Link: Vi Hart: A Case Study in Musical Memory and Past Lives

Vi Hart is an awesome video blogger that makes these really awesome videos explaining math concepts and other things. In this article, she discussed something I am fascinated with: memory, especially musical memory, and how we humans process memories.

A couple of significant paragraphs, to me:

Research shows that contrary to our perception, the more we recall a memory the more inaccurate it becomes. It changes, warps. We feel as if the more we rehearse it the clearer it becomes, and while it may seem clearer, it’s further from the original. The most accurate memories are the ones that pop up out of nowhere after years without thinking of them.

There’s parts of music that are like that. How a performance of a piece went. How its supposed to be played. How it felt to play it, the energy in the room, the quality of the instrument. The non-compositional details are the ones that fade and change like normal memory. But the thing itself, unlike memory, truly exists. A piece of music is a real thing. It is the part that does not change or fade no matter how often you assert its existence.

But go read the original, and listen to Vi’s pieces, and then think about stuff like that you’ve made.