Memorizing music, learning ornate melodies at first listen, composing complex ideas or improvising with overarching coherence all rely on storing musical ideas in working memory. Counterintuitively, having a capable musical memory doesn’t actually have very much to do with maximum cognitive aptitude for remembering. That’s a good thing because the working memory in raw terms is actually disappointingly meager: according to Miller’s Law, the immediate memory can only hold about seven things at a time (plus or minus two). Anything you’ll want to do musically is surely bound to be longer than that.
It turns out that improving musical memory is more about how you conceptualize music. Recognizing larger structures is the key. By identifying fragments of tonalities, harmonies, tetrachords and other ‘geometric’ outlines, we can compress massive swathes of melody into a few simple units. This facilitates the ability to think about, remember and work with genuinely large-scale musical ideas.
After following the techniques in this video, the augmentation of musical memory and subsequent functional improvement in related musical skills can be very dramatic!
