Be grateful, it’s not one of those “get off my lawn” type articles. It’s an article about musical memory and whether it plays tricks on us.

Run Time

It all started during my gym sessions. I try and run 3-5K several times a week on the treadmill. I live in Northern Ireland, a beautiful part of the world. The beach is five minutes walk from my house. So why in the name of all that is sacred would I go to a gym to run? Simple answer, the weather. There’s a reason it’s called the Emerald Isle, and that’s because of the lush grass. And the grass is so green because it rains most days, often several times a day. We have a saying where we live when talking about the weather; “give it ten minutes.” That’s because even if it was the middle of August and the sun was blazing down, give it ten minutes. So, I take my exercise at the gym.

This is where I started to wonder if there was something wrong. I had been playing a playlist on Apple Music called ‘Pop Workout’, it’s OK for the running bit. It’s fast paced, compressed to death, and perfect to get the heartbeat racing.

Once the run part is over I spend another 30 minutes walking and cooling down. It’s often at this point I try and find some more classic tracks. It’s music I have loved over several decades. This is where things started to get a little odd.

As I played each track, everything from Prince, The Police, Whitesnake, in fact a range of songs from previous decades, none of them sounded as good as I remembered. I wondered if it was the headphones, or the streaming. However, it wasn’t about that. It was that elements just didn’t sound as good as I remembered. Snares were limp, guitars not as in my face, all sorts of stuff just didn’t have the energy I thought they had.

What About The Science?

Had I misremembered what I had heard? Or was there something at play that was skewing my recollection of the audio footprint of, what I thought, were songs I knew very well? Was there some science behind this?

I started to do some research about audible memory. I found this article on Pastest where two studies came up with differing conclusions;

University of Iowa Study

In 2014, a study from the University of Iowa emerged whereby researchers claimed we don’t remember things that we hear nearly as well as we see or touch. They chose 100 undergraduate students to participate in two experiments. In the first test, participants listened to sounds, looked at images and held objects at varying intervals between 1 and 32 seconds. They were then asked to recall them.

The second experiment required the participants to listen, watch and touch everyday objects and asked them to recall them after an hour, a day and a week. The results from both experiments demonstrated that the auditory recall came last, far behind their visual memory. While the students’ memory declined in general as time elapsed, it was very clear that visual memory surpassed auditory.

University of Bordeaux Study

While it was proven in 2014 that students appeared to recall information better when they had seen it, in 2008 a study by the University of Bordeaux recognised that the ability to detect auditory and visual changes seemed to be controlled by separate mechanisms in the brain.

Researchers found that the participants found it easy to see visual changes but they also found that complex auditory changes were easily recognised too, which seems to suggest that differing parts of the brain deal with various techniques.

While memory is processed by the limbic system in the inner brain, it is the temporal lobes and occipital lobe that deal with hearing and vision respectively. These are located in other parts of the brain.

We started to talk about this on the team. It wasn’t that I was comparing old music with new music, that could explain a lot. Popular music has trends (the clues in the name) and during different periods vocals will be mixed higher. Or we’ll use more or less reverb. Snares will have different sounds, like gated snares in the 80s… and now back again. So, this isn’t about comparing a track made in 1980 with one made in 2023, it’s about the same track.

The Errors Of Youth

When you ask someone to name the best era in music, they will often point to a period around their formative years as a young adult. They will name artists and bands who were popular in this period. Most Radiohead fans will be of a certain age, as will U2 (yes really), The Police, or Queen.

One popular form of Radio is shows created around a certain decade of music, BBC Radio has shows like Sound of the 80s, or Sounds of the 70s, even the presenters are DJs who were popular in the period. There are entire radio stations that are just built around a certain decade of music, all the way back to start of popular music. These stations tap into our audio nostalgia, and given that these are some of the most listened-to shows, it seems we like a huge dose of music to remind us we used to be young, free, and single!

So perhaps this plays a part in us thinking music sounded better ‘back in the day’? Remember, I not talking about comparing the music of the past with today’s, I’m talking about if the music sounds as I think it does.

Listening Systems

As we discussed it on the Experts team we explored not only the music of our formative years that left a sonic footprint, but also the way we listened to that music.

Home music listening systems have certainly come a long way since the 1970s. In the past, vinyl records and turntables were the go-to audio source for music enthusiasts. Stereo systems with large speakers and traditional cassette tapes later took over in popularity.

However, the 1980s and 1990s brought about the advent of CD players, which replaced cassette tapes as the primary source of music. The 2000s saw the rise of MP3 players, such as the iPod, which revolutionized the way people consumed music.

In recent years, streaming music services have become the norm, with Bluetooth-enabled speakers and wireless headphones allowing for easy access to high-quality audio. Smart home devices, such as Amazon Echo and Google Home, also offer people a hands-free way to access their favourite music through voice commands. Overall, home music listening systems have undergone significant changes over the past few decades, reflecting the rapid pace of technological advancements.

Many of us listened to music exclusively on speakers. My sister had a large tower HiFi system which found its way into our dining room, the speakers were large enough to house a small family. I recall rushing out to buy the latest Police albums, coming home, hitting the Loudness button and cranking up the speakers. The house would shake and I would smile as Stewart Copeland hit the sh*t out of his drums, Sting would rock the bass, and Andy Summers would crank out a beautifully crafted guitar part, smeared in tons of chorus and delay. I was also lucky to see them twice in 1980 and 1981, front row, in the days before Health and Safety set volume limits. My ears rang for days after.

Perhaps it was the systems, always speakers, rarely on headphones. Was it simply a case of the ‘louder sounds better’ argument coming into play?

Test Yourself

How about you take the same test? Think of some tracks that you listened to non-stop back in the day. Choose a few, especially ones you’ve not listened to for some time. Now listen to them. Do they sound as you remember and expected? Do they sound different than you recall? Think about the energy and the sonic footprint.

One thing that seemed to be noticable for me is that snare drums were nowhere near as ballsy as I thought they were. My era was the 80s, and given the technological advances in recording and in playback, for example CD, some of the music doesn’t sound that good. The 70s in some cases contain some much better sounding records, one example is Michael Jackson’s 1979 album ‘Off The Wall’ - the sonics on that album are fabulous - full of energy.

One other thing we considered as the team was this. Do we superimpose the music production style of today back onto our memory of those old tracks? Snares are higher up in the mix, as are vocals. Bass is often far more noticable than it was back in the day.

The Answer

The answer to this is that there isn’t one for me, I’m rambling in an attempt to try and resolve this conundrum. I’m still wondering if it’s just me, or if when doing the test you come to the same conclusion? Perhaps it is nothing more than rose-tinted headphones? If this is the case and many of us do the same then does the statement “music sounded better then” really hold water?

Discuss.