Music and Memory: The Songs That Attach Themselves to Your Most-Loved Games

“Music, once admitted to the soul, becomes a sort of spirit, and never dies.”

That was 19th Century English writer Edward Bulwer-Lytton. He’s considerably more famous for penning the phrase “the pen is mightier than the sword”, as well as the illustrious opening line “It was a dark and stormy night”, but he was definitely onto something with his take on music. There is something special about it.

It’s that magic that makes you grin like a madman hooning around in 3,500 pounds of American muscle in Driver: San Francisco to the crunching neo soul funk rock of The Heavy’s Big Bad Wolf. The magic that gives you a mild shiver when the haunting guitar of Jose Gonzalez’s Far Away fades in as you enter Mexico for the first time in Red Dead Redemption.

But, of course, it’s not your soul it embeds itself in; it’s your brain.

Michael Jackson’s Billie Jean is widely considered to be one of the most revolutionary songs in history. It’s an exercise in pop perfection: infectiously catchy, admirably understated and sonically unmistakable. Legend has it the song was mixed by Bruce Swedien 91 times – unusual for Swedien, because it was about 90 more times than he usually mixed a track. In fact, Jackson’s producer Quincy Jones didn’t even want Billie Jean to appear on Thriller; he felt the song was weak and he wasn’t a fan of the unprecedented 29-second intro. But Jackson didn’t budge, and the rest is history.

It’s the song during which Jackson debuted the moonwalk to the world during his Motown 25 performance and it’s the song that propelled Thriller to become the biggest selling album of all time. Not only does Billie Jean define who Michael Jackson was, it defines an era. It’s the sound of the ’80s itself.

Rockstar knew this when it made what’s arguably Michael Jackson’s greatest hit a crucial part of 2002’s Grand Theft Auto: Vice City. The House That GTA Built knows how to use music effectively and perhaps the single best example of this is the opening moment of gameplay in Vice City. GTAIII trained players what to expect when getting into a car two years prior; the radio will turn on. It’s not a surprise to hear a song kick in the moment you slide behind the wheel but it is a surprise exactly which song you hear. It’s Billie Jean. Every time, for everybody; engineered to feel like a glorious accident when it’s actually deliberately designed that way. The neon lights and pastel pants have been searing Vice City’s ’80s atmosphere into your eyes from the get-go. Now it was time for it to ooze its way into your ears.

It’s hard to believe it’s been ten years since the release of Grand Theft Auto: Vice City. It’s even harder to believe that you can play the thing on your phone for around the price of a sandwich. However a smattering of songs from the original Vice City have been lost to the licensing gods for this 10th anniversary re-release and unfortunately Billie Jean is one of them. It feels strange to begin Vice City to something else. It speaks volumes about just how memorable the fusion of MJ and GTA was during the opening minutes of Vice City. When I hear Billie Jean I think of Vice City.

But why is that?

It’s been found autobiographical information that’s become associated with music can be evoked when we hear relevant tunes. A 2007 study that examined the memories and emotions triggered by hearing music from the past found that, on average, 30% of the songs presented to the participants evoked autobiographical memories, and the bulk of them also unearthed a variety of emotions that were mostly positive. The third most common emotion was nostalgia.

There’s actually a perfectly good reason for this, and it’s thanks to a part of the brain called the medial pre-frontal cortex.

Several years ago Petr Janata, a cognitive neuroscientist at University of California, Davis, began to suspect the medial pre-frontal cortex as a music-processing and music-memories region when he noted this part of the brain tracking chord changes and key changes in music. Since he had also seen studies which revealed activity in the exact same region during self-reflection and memory recall he decided to explore a potential music-memory link.

“What seems to happen is that a piece of familiar music serves as a soundtrack for a mental movie that starts playing in our head,” Janata told LiveScience at the time.

This would explain why the second Dexter Holland starts screaming, “Ya ya ya ya!” my mind becomes host to an impromptu Crazy Taxi Let’s Play video.

Janata found the brain region responded quickly to the music itself, but also found music tracking activity in the brain was more potent during particularly strong autobiographical memories.

It’s obviously not isolated to video games; maybe there’s a track that played during a first date, or a concert, or a movie scene you’ll remember forever. But the relationship between video games and music is a tight one and it’s likely that all manner of music will trigger fond memories in gamers.

Feeder’s Just a Day, used in the rollicking intro to Gran Turismo 3, makes me think of the first time I booted up my PS2, a console that cost me more money than the car I drove to collect it in did. That was a good day. Hearing Just a Day transports me back to that moment and I feel good.

I’m not ignoring original scores, but it seems moot to discuss whether the Uncharted theme reminds one of Uncharted, or the Metal Gear Solid theme reminds a gamer of Metal Gear Solid. What’s more interesting is the interesting tendency of existing music to become permanently associated with powerful and pleasant video game memories.

The early Tony Hawk games are a good example. The track lists are long and eclectic and I don’t doubt Tony Hawk fans from the late ’90s and early 2000s would have extensive lists of their own favourites, but I know I can’t hear Dead Kennedys’ Police Truck, Millencolin’s No Cigar or Bodyjar’s Not The Same without recalling time spent back in the glory days of the THPS series.

Used in the right place in the right game, for the right fan, even songs approaching 200 years old can become fused with video games. As a huge Hitman fan it’s completely impossible for me to hear Ave Maria and not think of Hitman: Blood Money and its unforgettable closing sequence. In fact, for many, Ave Maria has quickly become the series’ unofficial theme music, despite the fact the track wasn’t used until the fourth game and was composed by Franz Schubert in 1825.

The Rolling Stones’ Sympathy for the Devil, from the 1968 Beggar’s Banquet, is considerably younger than Schubert’s most-memorable ditty but still pre-dates Pong by several years. Today it tends to make me think of Call of Duty: Black Ops.

Music is processed by the lower, sensory levels of the brain, making it resistant to later memory complications like Alzheimer's. It’s been observed that Alzheimer's disease sufferers, ones that have long lost the ability to recognise relatives, can still have a positive response to music they recall from their past.

Music is a powerful memory tool and when a great deal of a gamer’s most-pleasing memories relate to their favourite video games over the years, it only stands to reason the two go hand in hand.

What music can you not hear without thinking about a video game you heard it in?

 Luke is Games Editor at IGN AU. You can chat to him about games, cars and all the incredible songs he had the audacity to neglect above on IGN here or find him and the rest of the Australian team by joining the IGN Australia Facebook community.

Source : ign[dot]com