Melodies as a Time Machine

Music has it’s way of getting to people through feelings in a very strong way, and those melodies are also timeless in way. Everyone has felt some nostalgia or flashbacks whenever a certain song is played, we see memories and feel what we felt in a specific moment or part of our lives and that is what makes music a sort of time machine.

Art has a way of unearthing the forgotten, taking you back to a time that was assumed drowned by alcohol and new memories. The beauty of nostalgia (…) The right song and the right place is a magical combination, a specific moment in time can be revisited like opening a page in your personal history book.

Yoh Phillips, DJBooth

It’s a very powerful feeling to have when you go by your regular day without worrying too much about thinking of things in your life, but then you get into a cab and “November Rain” by Guns n’ Roses is playing for some reason and you are pulled out of 2019 back to another time, as if your body stays here but every other part of you is in another place. This can make you feel sad, happy, nostalgic or even angry, but it certainly is as if you’re feeling something from another time.

This doesn’t trigger if you listen to a song very often, for example if there is a song you’ve been listening for 5 years fairly often, it will hardly make you relive the past in a very emotional way because the song has been with you as time passed by, but,if you have a song that you listened too almost everyday and then you stop and listen to it again after a few years, it will take you back instantly.

Music is always there, the memory card that returns you to certain checkpoints. From the good memories to the bad. All it takes is a verse, hook, or sample and you’re right back there like you never left.

Yoh Phillips, DJBooth

The Science Behind It

Neuroimaging has shown that songs stimulate many different areas of the brain, and give us a big hit of dopamine while they’re at it. Furthermore, hearing the same songs over and over—especially during particularly memorable events or formative periods in our lives—can make them stick, sometimes for life. We’re very good at recognising music that we’ve heard before, and associating it with certain memories. Scientists have even found that babies can do it from birth

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That last part may be why sometimes we hear music that sounds familiar but we don’t know when we heard it, it brings back memories but we don’t know which memories, it’s some sort of magical feeling that sticks with us for the rest of our lives.

A landmark 1999 study showed that music has enormous power to evoke memories in the listener. Music can provoke general recollections, for example the feeling of what it was like to be a child, or a uni student. And some songs will prompt nostalgia over more specific scenarios: important life events, like your first kiss or that particularly wild house party your best friend threw to celebrate the end of school exams. University of Melbourne neuropsychologist Amee Baird has even found that couples with a “special song” that signifies an important moment in their relationship will strengthen their bond—and possibly even alleviate the effects of dementia—by listening to it together and reminiscing.

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Music connects people but it also connects us with ourselves,our past selves in a way that no one else could comprehend, and that is why music also has a special power when we listen to it alone, it helps us reflect on the past and think about where we stand today