Does a song conjure painful memories? Try to rehabilitate it, say scientists

The Guardian

26-07-2025

When Bonnie hears the opening bars of the Verve's Bitter Sweet Symphony, she is transported back to 1997. But it isn't a joyful memory that comes to mind; it is the painful recollection of driving home from school and seeing the sheriff changing a lock on her house.
Then a teenager, Bonnie and her family were about to be evicted. And the Verve's song was everywhere.
'It was a big hit at the time, and it just seemed to be playing all the time, in takeaway shops and shopping centres, on the radio in the car. I just couldn't get away from this song,' she says.
To this day the 46-year-old who lives in Canberra, Australia, says she will change the radio or leave the location where the song is playing to avoid hearing it. 'The lyrics of this song too closely described our situation,' she says.
Indeed, many people avoid particular tunes because they are attached to the memory of an event that was either upsetting, or was once pleasant but has since become painful to recall.
For Matt, 52, an engineer in the north of England, the entire oeuvre of Neil Diamond is to be avoided after a partner with a love of the singer confessed to having lied about the nature of a relationship with a colleague.
'We used to like Friday night kitchen discos. We used to listen to all kinds, and usually Neil Diamond would be on,' Matt says, adding his former partner had been to several Neil Diamond concerts, including one with her boss before she met Matt.
The colleague, the woman insisted, had just been a friend. But after three years in a relationship with Matt, she confessed she had had an affair with her boss while she was married to her former husband and still had feelings for the colleague.
Now, says Matt, when a Neil Diamond song comes on the radio, he has to skip the track. 'If I go into my local pub and it's on the jukebox I'll go into the other room or go outside,' he says.
According to Ilja Salakka, a doctoral researcher at the University of Helsinki, the relationship between music and memories is linked to emotions.
'Emotions play a key role in long-lasting memories generally, and since music can evoke strong emotions, it is likely that music can enhance the memory related to an event,' he said. 'Of course, this can also work in reverse: an event itself may be emotional and strengthen the memory of a situation that involves music.'
Dr Stephanie Leal, a postdoctoral fellow at the University of California, Berkley, said that when emotionally arousing music occurs, or is paired with, an emotional experience, it can be difficult to pin down which is causing the emotions that help instil the memory. 'The type of emotional response can really dictate what we're holding on to in our memories,' she said.
In one study, Leal and colleagues found when people listened to music that induced either very strong or very weak emotions they were better able to remember the gist of an event, whereas they were better able to remember details when they had a more moderate emotional response.
Salakka added that typically it is music from a listener's teenage years or early adulthood that evokes most memories.
'[The] majority of memories attached to music tend to be positive in nature,' he added. But that is not always the case. 'Positive music-related memories are often more general in nature, whereas negative memories tend to be related to more specific events,' he said.
As Matt's experience shows, however, the emotions attached to a song, and its associated memory, can change. 'Now it's drawing up negative memories in that [it's] stirring up new emotions that weren't originally there,' said Leal.
While that may seem like the perfect reason to avoid a song, perhaps it could also bring hope. Although experts say there is a dearth of research in the area, they say it could be that listening to a painful song in new, happier contexts could rehabilitate it.
'If it's a very, very negative association with that song, maybe you'll never get over it,' said Leal. 'But the way to try is repeating it with new events that do make you happy and to hope that it overpowers and kind of reconnects your brain and rewires it to this new association.'
Prof Renee Timmers of the University of Sheffield added that these new associations must involve strong emotions, ideally occur in a social context, and be meaningful.
But Timmers also suggested another potential approach. 'Rather than seeing the music as something that is there, you can't do anything with it, and you are the victim of it, you can actually actively engage,' she said, adding that could involving humming along or even improvising on the music.
'Then the music becomes the active thing that you're engaging with, rather than the memory.'