Sound Memory Research Articles

The Effectiveness of Memory Strategies to Improve Students' Speaking Skills

This research studies the memory strategies used by the second semester STAI Ma’arif Magetan students to improve their speaking skills through involvement in English vocabulary. The purpose of this research is to find out the types of strategies and students' preferences in using strategic memory to improve their speaking skills. The data consists of memory strategies used by STAI Ma’arif Magetan students. The data source consisted of 30 second semester students. The memory strategy questionnaire was carried out for the data collection process. Data analysis was carried out using several steps such as data reduction, displaying data, and drawing conclusions. The research results showed: (1) students used ten indicators of strategic memory (grouping, associating, placing new words into a context, using images, semantic solvers, using keywords, representing sounds in memory, structural displays, using physical responses or sensation, and using mechanical techniques); (2) students' preferences in using memory strategies to place new words into context.

The Sound of Memory: Investigating Music Therapy's Cognitive Benefits in Patients with Dementia-A Network Meta-Analysis of Randomized Controlled Trials.

Numerous previous studies have shown the effectiveness of music therapy in enhancing cognitive functions in patients with dementia. Despite this, robust evidence in this field, especially concerning the comparison of different music therapy types, is lacking. Therefore, randomized controlled trials (RCTs) focusing on music therapy and cognitive functions in dementia patients, termed by "music" AND "dementia" OR "Alzheimer's disease" AND "cognitive", were identified from primary electronic databases to conduct this network meta-analysis (NMA). The primary outcome focused on the impact on cognitive functions, and the secondary outcome was the comparison of dropout rates between the intervention groups and the usual care control groups. Standardized mean difference (SMD) values and the corresponding 95% confidence intervals (CIs) were computed for effect evaluation. This study protocol has been registered in IPLASY (INPLASY202430082). A total of 14 RCTs with 1056 participants were enrolled, examining interventions including Active Music Therapy (AMT), Active Music Therapy with Singing (AMT + Sing), Rhythmic Music Therapy (RMT), Listening to Music (LtM), and Singing (Sing). The results indicated that RMT, AMT + Sing, and AMT all significantly improve cognitive functions in dementia patients, of which the SMD were 0.76 (95% CI = 0.32-1.21), 0.79 (95% CI = 0.03-1.49), and 0.57 (0.18-0.96), respectively. Compared with the control group (usual care), no music therapy type was associated with an increased dropout risk. In conclusion, music therapy can improve cognitive functions in patients with dementia without increasing the risk of dropout, particularly RMT, AMT + Sing, and AMT.

La agrupación temporal y los patrones como facilitadores de la comprensión psicológica de la información rítmica.

La estructuración y la agrupación influyen en la fragmentación mental de sonidos en la memoria, por lo que han sido consideradas como elementos fundamentales en las teorías modernas de cognición musical. En este trabajo se realiza una revisión de las aportaciones científicas al conocimiento de los fenómenos de estructuración temporal, agrupación de eventos y formación de patrones rítmicos. Con ello, se pretende delinear y ofrecer un panorama actualizado respecto a alguno de los factores facilitadores del procesamiento cognitivo del ritmo, para posteriormente considerar estos elementos en la formación musical inicial. Los principales hallazgos indican que la regularidad de los patrones rítmicos es un elemento clave para su procesamiento. Además, las secuencias rítmicas con relaciones 2:1 parecen ser las más sencillas de reproducir y percibir.
 Esta investigación fue patrocinada por el Ministerio de Ciencia e Innovación de España (PID2019-105762GB-I00).

The Sound of Memory: Acoustic Conflict and the Legacy of the French Wars of Religion in Seventeenth-Century Montpellier

This article explores the commemorative meaning of sound in early modern Montpellier, focusing on the use of processional music and church bells to remember the French Wars of Religion. Scholarship has demonstrated that music in post-Reformation Europe often served to consolidate confessional identities, but this article argues that in religiously mixed communities like Montpellier, sound also served as a memory vector. In the wake of the French religious wars, Protestants and Catholics developed competing soundscapes that revived painful memories about the wars and sustained religious tension throughout the seventeenth century. Catholics relied on frequent processions to recall the destruction of their churches and monasteries at the hands of the Protestants, and chose specific songs to underline their triumph in re-establishing Catholic worship. The memory of losing their church bells also prompted them to fight Protestant attempts at installing their own bells after the wars. On the basis of untapped archival sources, this article also reconstructs the musical culture of Catholics in seventeenth-century Montpellier, paying particular attention to the cathedral chapel and the confraternity of White Penitents.

The Sound of Memory in Public House

The Sound of Memory in <i>Public House</i>

A Brain System for Auditory Working Memory

The brain basis for auditory working memory, the process of actively maintaining sounds in memory over short periods of time, is controversial. Using functional magnetic resonance imaging in human participants, we demonstrate that the maintenance of single tones in memory is associated with activation in auditory cortex. In addition, sustained activation was observed in hippocampus and inferior frontal gyrus. Multivoxel pattern analysis showed that patterns of activity in auditory cortex and left inferior frontal gyrus distinguished the tone that was maintained in memory. Functional connectivity during maintenance was demonstrated between auditory cortex and both the hippocampus and inferior frontal cortex. The data support a system for auditory working memory based on the maintenance of sound-specific representations in auditory cortex by projections from higher-order areas, including the hippocampus and frontal cortex. In this work, we demonstrate a system for maintaining sound in working memory based on activity in auditory cortex, hippocampus, and frontal cortex, and functional connectivity among them. Specifically, our work makes three advances from the previous work. First, we robustly demonstrate hippocampal involvement in all phases of auditory working memory (encoding, maintenance, and retrieval): the role of hippocampus in working memory is controversial. Second, using a pattern classification technique, we show that activity in the auditory cortex and inferior frontal gyrus is specific to the maintained tones in working memory. Third, we show long-range connectivity of auditory cortex to hippocampus and frontal cortex, which may be responsible for keeping such representations active during working memory maintenance.

Editorial: The Role of Sound in Motor Perception and Execution

“Perception and action” is one of the main research fields in which experimental psychologists work together with experts of other disciplines, such as medicine, physiotherapy, engineering, and sport. Traditionally, researchers have mainly focused on visual perception and on its influences on motor processes, while less attention has been dedicated to the role of auditory perception. However, in the last decade, the interest towards the influence of sounds on both action perception and motor execution has increased significantly. On the one hand, researchers have been interested in determining how humans can represent motor actions through the sounds associated with movements, as well as which auditory cues are salient for recognizing and discriminating different features of movement [1-10]. On the other hand, researchers have studied how auditory stimuli affect the production of complex movements in different domains [11-21]. The general aim of this special issue is to provide an overview of the relationship between sounds and movements by addressing theoretical, methodological, and applied issues from a multidisciplinary perspective.

The organization of words and environmental sounds in memory

In the present study we used event-related potentials to compare the organization of linguistic and meaningful nonlinguistic sounds in memory. We examined N400 amplitudes as adults viewed pictures presented with words or environmental sounds that matched the picture (Match), that shared semantic features with the expected match (Near Violation), and that shared relatively few semantic features with the expected match (Far Violation). Words demonstrated incremental N400 amplitudes based on featural similarity from 300–700ms, such that both Near and Far Violations exhibited significant N400 effects, however Far Violations exhibited greater N400 effects than Near Violations. For environmental sounds, Far Violations but not Near Violations elicited significant N400 effects, in both early (300–400ms) and late (500–700ms) time windows, though a graded pattern similar to that of words was seen in the mid-latency time window (400–500ms). These results indicate that the organization of words and environmental sounds in memory is differentially influenced by featural similarity, with a consistently fine-grained graded structure for words but not sounds.

The Sound of Memory: Interview with Singer, Mohinder Kaur Bhamra

The Sound of Memory: Interview with Singer, Mohinder Kaur Bhamra

Embedded Picture Mnemonics to Learn Letters

Can embedded mnemonics ease the task of learning a foreign alphabet? English-speaking preschoolers (N = 36, M = 5;2 years) were taught 10 Hebrew letter-sound relations. Experimental letters were learned with mnemonics that embedded letter shapes in drawings of objects whose shapes resembled the letters and whose English names began with the letters' sounds (e.g., , desk, /d/). Control letters were learned with the same objects but depicted unlike letter shapes. Children learned to segment initial sounds in words. Then they learned each letter set to criterion in a counterbalanced, repeated measures design. Embedded letters were mastered in fewer trials, were less frequently confused with other letters, were remembered better 1 week later, and facilitated performance in word reading and spelling transfer tasks compared to control letters. We suggest that embedded mnemonics better secured letters to their sounds in memory which in turn improved word learning for children in Ehri's (2005) partial alphabetic phase.

The Sound of Memory: Music and Acoustic Origins

This essay advances a novel interdisciplinary approach toward understanding the dialectical transmission, registration, and interpretation of meaning from sound in the psychoanalytic dialogue. The first step examines the profound formative influences of the earliest sound environment in psychological development. The second, utilizing clinical material, considers adult patients' abstract or ineffable nonlinguistic and nonverbal communications as a form of music being verbalized in a language of sounds—termed the verbalization of music—which audio-symbolically conveys derivatives of archaic auditory impressions, perceptions, and interactions. The last segment proposes a consilient view of music and mentation, founded in a conceptualization of music as a patterned sonic iteration of affect and ideation giving auditory tangibility to the incipient sound world, with the aim of clarifying how analysts hear and interpret meaning in idiolectic sonic renderings of individual interiority—the sound of memory.

Multiple mechanisms of auditory attention

Selective attention limits processing so we can handle the vast amount of information that we encounter daily. Actively selecting a subset of sensory information has been shown to bias response properties of neurons within sensory cortices, generally seen as an enhancement of the neural activity associated with the attended stimuli. This talk will present another type of attention effect on neural activity, affecting the representation of sequential sounds in memory. Event-related brain potentials were used to identify the timing of various cognitive processes, the subjects’ perception of the sounds, and to assess the stages at which attention interacted with sensory input in perception. In one study, attention modified the grouping and storage of sequential sounds, reflected by the absence or presence of specific ERP components. In another study neural representations were biased by stimulus-driven factors without attentional control. In a third study, attention increased accuracy for discriminating stimulus information but did not change the way the information was organized in auditory memory. These results indicate that there is more than one mechanism of auditory attention operating at different processing stages depending on the listeners task, and supports the view that attention interacts with stimulus-driven processes to facilitate behavioral goals. [Research supported by NIH.]

Sound-Symbol Learning in Children with Dyslexia

This study evaluated the effect of sound-symbol association training on visual and phonological memory in children with a history of dyslexia. Pretests of phonological and visual memory, a sound-symbol training procedure, and phonological and visual memory posttests were administered to children with dyslexia, to children whose dyslexia had been compensated through remedial training, and to age- and reading level-matched comparison groups. Deficits in visual and phonological memory and memory for sound-symbol associations were demonstrated in the dyslexia group. For children with dyslexia and children whose dyslexia had been remediated, the sound-symbol training scores were significantly associated with word and pseudoword reading scores and were significantly lower than those of the comparison groups. Children with dyslexia and children whose dyslexia had been compensated showed significantly less facilitation of phonological memory following the training than did typical readers. Skilled readers showed some reduction in accuracy of visual memory following the training, which may be the result of interference of verbalization with a predominantly visual task. A parallel decrease was not observed in the children with dyslexia, possibly because these children did not use the verbal cues. Children with dyslexia and children whose dyslexia had been compensated seemed to have difficulty encoding the novel sounds in memory. As a result, they derived less phonological memory advantage and less visual memory interference from the training than did typical readers. Children in the compensated dyslexia group scored lower on sound-symbol training than their age peers. In other respects, the scores of these children were equivalent to those of the typically reading comparison groups. Children in the compensated dyslexia group exhibited higher phonological rehearsal, iconic memory, and associative memory scores than children in the dyslexia group. Implications for the remediation of dyslexia are discussed.

The Sound of Memory

Not my language but a voice chanting in patterns survives on earth not history's bones but vocal tones. Allen Ginsberg Elegies for Neal Cassady The critical vocabulary that has emerged and evolved to describe and analyze spaces of Jewish absence and memory in Germany has been, for most part, visual. In this essay, I shift emphasis from visual to aural, to of in poetic texts and echo of elegiac that constitutes representation of Shoah. I maintain that circulation and proliferation of visual images-the of Shoah as Liss and Hirsch define postmemory-contain as well echo of sound of memory. By thus shifting focus from visual to aural and by exploring several key iconic sounds that generate German and Jewish memory, I hope to add a new layer to exploration ofthe sites of Jewish and German memory. The primacy of visual draws on concepts of authenticity, illusion, and spectatorship that stretch back to Aristotle and Plato and inform contemporary critical discussion about documentary, archival, and video testimonies.1 While critical work by Hirsch, Zelizer, and others has provided invaluable reflection on elusiveness of visuality of memory, there has been relatively little attention paid to what I will be calling sound of memory. The sound of memory can be a tangible recording of how an event is remembered acoustically, while memory of sound presupposes a melancholic relationship to sound that once was and is now lost. The sound of memory is more elusive and perhaps more fragile and transient than visual sites of memory; significantly, of five senses, sound is only one that requires a medium for its transmission (Taylor 34). In medium of film, as Michel Chion has observed, if sounds are easily projected by spectator onto film image, it is because image is circumscribed by a that can be located in space, whereas sound lacks a frame (Chion 204). This lack of a for aural, in contrast to visual, demands that an inquiry into relationship between sound and memory will be, perhaps, more speculative and openended than one that examines visual sphere. The following questions thus serve as speculative points of departure for an inquiry into relationship between memory and sound: Can we speak of iconic sounds as we do of iconic images? Can an exploration of sound help demarcate lines that shape and define German and Jewish memory? Can we speak of a site of memory as sound of memory? If visual sites of memory-memorials, photographs, installations-in Germany today suggest enormous difficulties inherent in project of remembrance, as James Young and others have demonstrated, into what terrain does an exploration of sound of memory lead us? Finally, how can a turn to aural help us rethink trope of unspeakability of Holocaust? To begin answering these questions, I propose that visual imprint of memory and acoustic echo of prior sounds create sites of memory in Germany that can be reached through what Umberto Eco has described as a travel in hyperreality, where in order to attain the real thing, one must fabricate the absolute fake (8). The hyperreal blurs distinction between presence and absence, between photographic image and death, between sound and silence, crafting sites of authenticity that are no longer historical, but instead visual, where, as Eco suggests, everything looks real, and therefore it is real; in any case fact that it seems real is real, and thing is real even if, like Alice in Wonderland, it never existed (16). Yet contained within hyperreal and circulation of memory as postmemory are sound and aural, not just visual. Eco, of course, is speaking here of American culture's need to recreate history in form of wax museums and reconstructed historical sites, but his point is also well taken for shape and form of Jewish commemoration in Germany in past decade. …

Schubert and the Sound of Memory

We are what we remember. Nothing is so uniquely one's own as one's memories-not only because they form the transcript of an individual history, but also because that transcript is so idiosyncratically preserved, so personally constructed and maintained. We are how we remember. The act of recollection is a fundamentally creative act as well as an existential act; it is at once self-expression and self-constitution. The more overtly self-expressive acts that we call art mirror this aspect of recollection in that they too devolve upon a content that is referred to and a way of referring to that content, and the two are not usually separable. It is thus no coincidence that we often treat artworks as if they exude consciousness. And the analogy gathers force with music, which relies so fundamentally on the repetition of its own past events as a means of gaining coherence. Music is an art form that seems to aspire to the condition of memory, which may be why some romantics wished for their various arts to aspire to the condition of music. For there is nothing so compelling in the worldview of romanticism as the pull of what is no longer, or not yet, there. Music gains immediacy and authenticity from the very fact of its irrevocable transience. Like our perception of time, music moves toward the future, inviting us to anticipate, while also streaming into the past, inviting us to recollect. That the later instrumental music of Franz Schubert stands as a distinctive realization of this recollective mode of musical consciousness is the motivating assumption of the articles in this volume by Walter Frisch, John Daverio, Charles Fisk, and John Gingerich. The music they discuss faces backward rather than forward, recreating a past rather than creating a future--or, putting it more provocatively, creating a past rather than recreating a future. Taking a cue from Carl Dahlhaus, Frisch hears in Schubert's String Quartet in G Major (D. 887) a thoroughgoing logic of reminiscence. The very opening of the first movement remembers some baroque musical gestures, and then the crucial bars that follow remember the opening. Passages in later movements remember signal events and moods from

Psychmuse: A Macintosh system for psychomusicology research

A software system developed with HyperCard has been designed to support research relying on musical stimuli. The software accesses a set of digitized sounds in memory that consist of chromatic scale notes for the piano, harp, and guitar. Menu options allow experimenters to create monophonic melodies, to arrange melodies in a prescribed order, and to present them in a flexible format for a variety of psychological tasks. In addition to supporting experimental research projects, the software can also be used to demonstrate certain fundamental principles of auditory perception and cognitive psychology.