Music Rewrites Memories

We’ve all experienced a familiar piece of music taking us back to a particular moment in our past. Marketers have used that idea for a long time – pair a sound with an experience, repeat it, and hope the sound helps bring the experience to mind later.

But memory also has a less well-known property. Recalling an experience can change what we remember about it. That raises an intriguing question for sonic branding. What happens when someone encounters a brand’s music (its “sonic branding”) after they’ve already formed an impression of the brand?

A 2024 study by researchers at Georgia Tech and the University of Colorado Boulder offers some clues. On the first day of the study, participants learned short stories with no strong emotional tone. On the second day, they were asked to recall the stories while listening to either upbeat music, downbeat music or no music. Then on the third day, they were asked to recall the stories once more, but this time in silence. The researchers were testing whether the music heard while remembering an experience could change what people remembered the next day.

It did.

Participants were more likely to add details to a story that matched the mood of the music they had heard on day two. When they recalled the stories again on day three, without music, their memories still had a stronger emotional tone in that same direction. The music had played no part in the stories when participants first learned them. It was introduced a day later, while they were recalling them, yet its influence remained when they remembered them again.

The researchers also scanned participants’ brains during the second day and found changes in activity in areas involved in memory and emotion. But the clearest result needs no brain scan to explain – music heard during recall affected how people remembered the stories later, even when the music was gone.

The most surprising part is the timing. The music came after participants had learned the stories, yet it affected how they remembered them the following day. Memory isn’t a recording that plays events back unchanged. When we recall an experience, we reconstruct it, and something we encounter during that recall can become part of how we remember it later.

Now imagine a customer who has already used your brand. Some time later – it could be days, weeks or months – they see an ad. It reminds them of that earlier experience, but now with your brand’s sonic logo and/or music playing. Could the music affect how they feel about that experience when they think of it again? The study gives us a reason to think that might just be the case.

To be sure, there are important limits to what we can take from this study. Participants remembered stories they had learned in a lab. They weren’t thinking back on a real experience with a brand. The researchers also asked what people remembered the next day without music; they didn’t play the same music again to see what it brought back.

But the study gives us a good reason to ask different questions when choosing music for a brand. If an ad reminds someone of a purchase they made last month, how does the music affect the way they feel about that purchase? Does it make the brand itself more appealing, or does the ad simply feel more moving while it plays? The answer won’t necessarily be the same for a bespoke score, a licensed song and a sonic logo. What matters is the effect of the sound in the situation where people hear it.

The practical opportunity is to evaluate sound beyond whether people like or recognize it. Ask what happens to the brand when they hear it. Does the brand feel more appealing? Is it easier to remember? If the music reminds customers of an experience they’ve already had, find out whether it changes how they feel about that experience.

The Georgia Tech study showed that music heard during recall can influence how a neutral story is remembered later. Whether the same thing happens with brands remains to be tested. But it gives us a compelling question to put to consumers:

When your sound brings the brand to mind, what feelings come back with it?