Featured article: Optimizing Song Retention Through the Spacing Effect; Katz, Ando & Wiseheart; Cognitive Research: Principles and Implications;  Department of Psychology, York University, Toronto, Canada; https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/34894323/

How do my 16-year-old daughter and wife (29 years old, yet again) both have an encyclopedic knowledge of the songs and lyrics from famous (and not so famous) singer-songwriters of the 1960s and 1970s: John Denver, Jim Croce, Cat Stevens, Neil Diamond, Don Maclean, Willie Nelson, Glen Campbell and even Freddie Fender. (I grew up with New Wave and Hair Metal music in southern California in the 1980s but now prefer audiobooks!). 

As someone who has researched the spacing effect, it is my hypothesis that it is the endless spaced repetition of these songs on the radio, on Sirius XM and on Pandora, which has generated their remarkable memory of these songs and lyrics. Finally, I have some good evidence on my side! 

The spacing effect is one of the foundational elements of Qstream and refers to the cognitive research finding that memory retention is improved when learning episodes are spaced out over intervals of time rather than massed into a single learning session. Drs. Katz, Ando and Wiseheart ask whether the spacing effect can be harnessed to improve the retention of words and music in song. To answer this, they conducted a randomized trial among 87 second-year music majors at York University. The music used in the study was a newly composed two-verse song based on traditional music from Nova Scotia. There were 3 phases to the study.

• Phase 1 (initial study session): All students were given an initial study session where they were trained to 95% correct memory for sung words.
• Phase 2 (randomized review sessions): Students were randomly assigned to a review session either 10 minutes after phase 1 (massed), 2 days later or 7 days later.  
• Phase 3 (final test, 3 weeks after phase 1):  Students’ performances were evaluated for the number of correct and incorrect syllables, correctly and incorrectly pitched notes, degree notes that were off pitch and hesitations while singing.  

On all parameters evaluated, the researchers found that spacing of the review session generated significantly better performance than massed training. Interestingly, they were not able to find any significant differences in these outcome measures between the 2-day and 7-day spacing intervals, in contrast to prior studies on verbal learning in which the longer spacing generally improves longer-term retention. The researchers hypothesize that this may be due to the inherent ‘stickiness’ of songs: “lyrics have strong internal cues and a single theme, whereas most (verbal) studies have investigated random word pairs, trivia factors of other sets of discrete items.”  

While I can still find no research or data as to why my wife and daughter have such bad tastes in music, I now at least have a better idea why their favorite songs and lyrics are so deeply embedded in their memories.

For more information on how to improve to build long-term knowledge retention, download Scientifically Proven Strategies for Building Long-Term Knowledge Retention.