Music and Narrative Memory

Music can overlap with many activities, but its effects on our memory for those activities are not fully understood. The experiments here investigated the effects of calm and intense background music on both memory and narrative transportation (the feeling that one is absorbed into the events of a narrative) during reading. Participants read narratives either in silence or with background music and completed a measure of narrative transportation (Transportation Scale-Short Form; Appel et al., 2015). Participants were then tested, either in silence or with background music, on memory for explicit details and inferences from the narrative. Across both experiments, memory task performance was consistently better for inferences compared to explicit details. In Experiment 1, encoding condition showed a non-significant trend toward an effect on memory task performance, with slightly better memory when narratives were accompanied by calm music during reading than by silence. Breaking it down further, participants who enjoyed the music and participants who felt the music matched the narratives showed a benefit of music accompanying the memory task. In Experiment 2, for intense music, participants who felt the music did not match the narratives showed a benefit of silence accompanying the memory task. Overall, this study showed that the ability of music to benefit memory for a narrative seems to be dependent upon both the music and the individual reading the narrative. Future research could explore a wider variety of music, participant-selected music, a longer retention interval, and music intended to match the narrative.