I find that writing songs is actually very useful for my memory, despite me mostly preferring visual information. If I have to remember something very complicated and unintuitive, it helps for whatever reason. Is that weird? Why isn’t it discussed here a lot? I’m curious.
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Writing songs, even bad ones, helps me sometimes in recalling information I want to memorize. I definitely feel that the beat and rhythm aid in memorization and help pull up the next item sometimes, or help me remember related info I want to memorize. I guess it is like the Major System here - one item gives clues to the next. So maybe ultimately, it’s like a linking system.
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After reading the Memory Craft by @LynneKelly I got the idea of trying to replace a lyric for a song with the things I wanted to remember. Seemed like a brilliant thing to do as it would make things easier to remember in order. The goal was to create something like this : https://youtu.be/1cqauZq4uYM
My idea was to take an original song where I know the melody well and map out the syllables, take my list of words I wanted to remember and do the same thing and then try to match/map it together. Didn’t work too well but I still think this could be quite useful. So any ideas on how to map word lists on to songs?
As an example how could this be mapped to a song (I just picked random words):
- lip
- economics
- life
- kiss
- combat
- testimony
- nightmare
- struggle
- novel
- branch
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Start off with a familiar song, and then for the lyrics, you need to incorporate the words in this order. You can use cues to lead to the next word, but in general avoid it. For example, I’ll take the chorus from “Flying Purple People Eater”. Oh, it was a…
One-eyed one-horned flying purple people eater
One-eyed one-horned flying purple people eater
One-eyed one-horned flying purple people eater
Sure looks strange to me.
And now we need to put the words to remember in the song. What was it again? Oh it was a…
Lip economics life kiss combat
Testimony nightmare, it was a struggle
Lip economics life kiss combat
Struggle novel branch.
Not perfect, and we had to jump back a bit to get the rhythm to work out better, but from repeating this, the list will probably be memorized in about 10-15 minutes.
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I try to choose my mnemonics so that they have a rhythm or a consistent beat. I use the non value letters in the Major System to fill out the number of syllables I need.
Composing even a simple song takes time and some skill which I don’t have.
Hey, even bad songs work. You don’t have to be a professional poet to write songs. I’m not. I will admit that it is a matter of experimentation here. And maybe songs don’t stick in your brain. That’s also okay.
If I were to recall the list of people who posted, I’ll write it to the same tune as an example.
The creator of the thread was Icosencephalic
user_7e, Icos, juman, Icos
Then there’s zvuv, then there’s Icos, (juman didn’t post twice, oops.)
And with that, we’re done (for now)
I posted every other post on this thread, and that helps out the rhyme scheme. Even if it didn’t, I’d be able to make things work.
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I like using established songs - I’m not one to write an entirely new melody to memorize something. Rhymes take a bit of effort for me, but the “word vomit” I spew out onto the melody usually works. I agree that this method could be very useful if it were more structured. I don’t know how many people do some sort of variation of this already. How is this not considered a formal or established technique?
Writing melodies is hard. I’ve never been successful at it or I end up accidentally plagiarizing another song.
I’d be interested to know how your experiments go.
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What a fun and interesting thread !
I for one wouldnt create a new song. I would use a song I know very well and love very much and as I go along singing it, I would link what I want to learn to key parts of it.
As I am used to taking audio and transform it into various images form different sources, I will definitely use this method. I cant believe I havent thought about it before, thank you so much !
my example with your list :
The Beatles song : A day in the life :
I read the news today, oh boy (big lipped boy)
Four thousand holes in Blackburn, Lancashire (my economy teacher wears a dress full of holes ahhh)
And though the holes were rather small (tiny man with LIFEjacket)
They had to count them all (Count Dracula kissing all the Beatles)
Now they know how many holes it takes to fill the Albert Hall (Arsenio HALL combat fighting in the court of law in TESTIMONY chair)
I’d love to turn you (giving love to Freddie Kruger(nightmare) by giving him a Strudel - struggle)
Not verbatim and it still works fine because the mind is a great guesser !
i try to imagine the tiny man in LIFEjacket when singing “…rather small”, perhaps even place the tiny lifejacket man in one of the holes of my economics teacher!
On the second round of revision I see it without effort, as I do the rest of the images.
Singing ‘count’ Count dracula pops up and corresponding info
Singing ‘holes’ immediately see my economy teacher full of holes…
fun!
I need to use this.
“”
Here is a rework of my try to use syllables to break a list down. I picked the song The Proclaimers - I’m Gonna Be (500 Miles) Video which has a simple beat. Taking the chorus I broke it down to beats/syllables like this :
Then I replaced the syllables by breaking down the list to memorize above like this 
This works… kind of but the text would probably be more memorizeable if adding some words to the text to make it more like a story and still fit in the beat.
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I have used poems as Journey/Memory palace. The poem itself has to be memorized, just like one would with an imaginary palace. I’m thinking of using Tyger for my next applications.
I mostly use existing familiar melodies and redo the words. I use puns and stories and fun to make the song memorable. But for something like the family names of birds, I let the rhythm of the Latin names dictate the tune / chant and puns gave me a story line. It is less tuneful, but works for those words.
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But is it possible to encode more than lists of ten random ideas?
I’m imagining layering various lists of ten things as a tree, accessing each node through triggers in a song. So the song is just one layer of a traditional peg mnemonic system.
It certainly is a talent to put words to music!
I can’t understand how anyone can do it at all.
A little off topic, but there was a guy ( Roger Whittaker), who had a radio show and he launched a competition asking for stories and poems, and he would put chosen ones to music which he made up. Such a tale came from a silversmith in England (Whittaker was a white African folk singer I believe), which he liked and put to music. It later became a hit in multiple countries (the song is: The Last Farewell). This was of course quite a while ago (when they were making vinyl records, maybe a couple of hundred years ago).
…I think most would fare better sticking to tunes they know well !
If you can put your memory task to music, then I think anecdotal evidence probably most of us have is that you can recall words to songs that you haven’t thought about in years, so it would seem to be very effective.
I have songs which are layered. So the base song just gives the list, but there are songs linked to each member of the list. In my bird families song, there are 82 families. Some of them then have further songs, and stories. Some have dances mimicking behaviour. But most of my songs don’t tend to stand alone. I have them linked to other mnemonic methods, like memory boards (hand held portable memory palaces), stories, and full scale memory palaces.
Some of the stand alone songs are for foreign language vocabulary. For example, I sing body parts in the shower in a song about washing.
Lynne
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An important detail, this is. Listed in book, I wish this was. Not paying attention though, I could have been.
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I find it interesting that the Aeneid and the Illiad in the Greek and Roman world were probably recited from memory, and to music.
I found a reconstruction of what we think it would have sounded like:
It does strangely sound a bit like rap music.
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I sometimes use song bits in my memory palaces, where a song might have a word or a phrase that fits what. I do the same thing with actors saying words from lines in movies. I have them say it in their voice. It’s a type of elaborative encoding. I do that with my 1-100 list too. Many of the characters have short audio bits associated with them.
Regarding songs, is it more difficult to get the information out of them? For example, with a memory palace I can go directly to any station in the palace. I can jump around in any order. Audio isn’t like that, it’s more sequential. I’m talking about a song that’s not connected to a location. I guess I can jump around somewhat but not as fast. Does anyone have any thoughts about that?
This topic is interesting. There is so much to experiment with.
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Ugghh. @Niten, as a musician, I don’t think he would make it to the Colosseum. Maybe a less twangy voice with a sense of melody is what I would expect. The guy never changes his two notes! Maybe we need a little jazz chord progressions also or at least a I-IV-V. Even rap freestyle has more than a beat.
The music does form the basic dactylic hexameter in sound which I have never heard performed with Homer. That’s a half, quarter, and quarter note for six out of eight measures. It’s exactly like Little Drummer Boy for the most part.
@deeptravel song lyrics are just memory stories set to music. I see melody as a memory story in sound also so they complement each other and reinforce each other in our brains since they use different parts.
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I agree totally. If I want something where I am going to add more information - history, languages, periodic table … I would much rather use a memory palace. But for somethings, I prefer a song.
For example, I have the countries of the world in a memory palace in population order - China, India, USA … I add capitals and everything else to the relevant location. But I struggled with their location on a map. So I created song. I sing the countries of Africa, for example, in order clockwise from Tunisia. I have songs for different geographical regions. That works really well for locations, but I don’t add anything else to the song.
I sing the bird families around my lukasa/ memory board. But I add further information to the stories associated with the beads and shells, not to the song. I just found the song useful initially to remember the the scientific names through the rhythm if singing them in order. I don’t use it any more.
I hope that makes sense.
Lynne
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