Song Lyrics and Short-Term Memory

"Do you know any hiking songs?"

A few weeks ago I was on a hike with my German friend Dani, and somewhere along the trail she asked me if I knew any hiking songs. In Germany, singing while you walk is an old tradition, and she assumed I knew some.

I couldn't think of a single one, and I felt a little embarrassed. I teach music for a living, but the only songs I knew all the way through were Music Together songs. That stuck with me for the rest of the walk. How many songs do any of us know by heart anymore? Not songs we can recognize, or hum along to when they come on. Songs we could start singing with friends and finish without looking anything up.

For most of us, I suspect the honest answer is very few.

Where our remembering went

As I sit here writing this, my phone is next to me. Whenever I need information, I look it up, many times a day. I'm not here to scold anyone, because I'm on my phone plenty, even though I'm always telling my kids to get off theirs. We don't need a study to tell us what's happening. We can all feel it. We're handing our short-term memory to the device that's always within reach.

That doesn't mean our brains are broken. Our minds have simply adjusted. Song lyrics are a good example. Why learn lyrics when they are always one search away?

The trouble is that you can't sing together from a search result. A song only belongs to a group when the people in it know the words themselves.

What a song asks of us

A song is one of the oldest memory tools people have. Melody and rhythm help us remember words, because the tune gives the words something to anchor to. That is why you can still sing a jingle from a local TV ad you learned as a child, and why the ABC song works so well as a scaffold for learning the alphabet.

This is why we sing the same collection all semester. The recording is where the songs start. The goal is for the songs to stop needing it. Week after week, the words move from the speaker into your voice, and most parents notice a moment when they start a song in the car without pressing play and their child fills in the next part.

I want to be honest that this is a tiny remedy. Learning a few songs won't undo years of googling. But every song you know by heart is a small piece of memory that lives in you instead of in your pocket. Learning it asks your memory to do real work, the gentle and joyful kind. And when you sing it with your child, you are doing that work together.

A family songbook

Our classes already take care of part of this. When you sing with us each week and sing those songs at home with your kids, they lock in on their own. That's why Music Together songs were the only ones I could think of on that trail.

Sarah Parker, whose family I wrote about recently, saw this happen a few weeks ago. On a long drive to Vermont, her family played our song collection twice, and it was the only thing that kept her daughter Olivia from fussing. The next morning, at the home of the friends they were visiting, Olivia sang with their baby, Emmett, whose family takes Music Together in Vermont. Every Music Together center in the northern hemisphere uses the same collection at the same time, so two babies hundreds of miles from St. George's already shared a set of songs. That's exactly what Dani and I were missing on the trail.

But a family's songbook can hold more than what we sing in class. What about the song your grandmother sang while she cooked, or the one your grandfather sang in the car? What about a song from your family's heritage, maybe in a language you don't speak every day? Not to mention lullabies. Those songs don't lock in by themselves anymore. Nowadays, we have to decide to learn them.

The Parkers' songbook already reaches past our collection. Sarah sings Amazing Grace to Olivia at bedtime. Her mom, Cynthia, sang Child of Mine to Sarah when she was small. And in the sleepless newborn days, Sarah and her husband Will made up a song about Olivia to the tune of Frosty the Snowman.

The Zembers show what deciding to learn looks like. When her son Sela was born, Dena told me she had almost no songs to sing him. She kept cycling through Twinkle Twinkle, the ABCs, and Old MacDonald. Four years later, her family has a whole library. They turned our goodbye song into a goodnight song and have sung it to both boys at bedtime ever since. Dena's mom still sings the Farsi lullaby she once sang to Dena, now to her grandsons at naptime. Dena knows the melody but never quite learned all the words, so for now the lyrics live with her mom. As long as Grandma keeps singing, there's still time to learn them. You can read the Zembers' story here.

So here is some homework for you, and for me. Let's set the bar low: one song a season. That's four songs a year, learned all the way through, that don't come from class. Ask a parent or grandparent to sing one for you, and record them while you're at it. Write down the words, then sing it at bath time or in the car until you don't need the paper. If you forget a verse, make one up.

As for me, I'm learning a hiking song before my next walk through the Alps!

If your family isn't singing with us yet, there is room for you. Come see what a class sounds like at mistermikesmusic.com.