Why Music? The Key to Memory

Available for over a year

Presented by Tom Service. In this special live edition of the programme, Music Matters teams up with psychologists from Goldsmiths, University of London, led by Dr Daniel Mullensiefen, for the Music Matters Lab. Daniel and his colleagues will be revealing the results of experiments created specially for the programme, aimed at testing short-term memory for melody and rhythm. To explore what difference that makes to our understanding and enjoyment of music, Tom is joined by Professor Adam Ockelford, who has written extensively on how the human brain makes sense of music. And the composer Anne Dudley explains how she relies on a TV audience's ability to remember, when writing theme tunes for programmes including Jeeves & Wooster and Poldark. Conductors Jonathan Nott and Karina Canellakis reveal how they memorise an orchestral score, and what motivates them to conduct without one, and Tom visits rehearsals for the Hospital Passion Play, an opera by Orlando Gough which deals with memory loss through the testimony of stroke survivors. Live from Wellcome Collection as part of Why Music? The Key to Memory, a weekend of events, concerts and discussions exploring the implications of music's unique capacity to be remembered.