They can learn the lyrics...

“They can learn the lyrics to loads of songs, but they can’t remember…”

I have heard a phrase like this many times in my career in schools, usually from one of two sources:

1. People who are advocating for more “fun” in lessons – if we make lessons as engaging as the popular songs of the day then kids will remember the content as well as they remember the lyrics to songs.
2. People bemoaning the lack of students’ retention of the subject matter they are teaching.

I am by no means a musical person. I never learned to read music, or to play any instrument beyond very basic keyboard skills. I typically have no clue if something is in tune, or ability to harmonise. I do, however, very much enjoy singing along to songs on the radio (much to my wife’s chagrin). It was whilst doing this recently on a drive that I reflected on the fallacy of the idea that learning song lyrics is akin to learning the content of a lesson or curriculum at school.

In my reflections I identified four types of songs that I can associate with my ability to reproduce the lyrics of: 

1. Songs that I know the lyrics of completely – that is to say I can write out the complete and correct lyrics even in the absence of the tune or words.
2. Songs that I know all (or nearly all) of the lyrics in context – these are the songs that I can comfortably sing along to, matching the words as they are sang by the artist (or get the timing right on the rare occasions I sing karaoke), but I require at least the tune, and probably the words, to be present in some form.
3. Songs that I know some of the lyrics in context (and maybe some without the context) – these are the songs where I can sing along to bits of them (usually the chorus or an early verse), and may even be able to reproduce those words without the tune if asked to say or write them, but there will be other parts of the song that I don’t know and will have to stop singing to.
4. Songs that I don’t know the lyrics of at all – speaks for itself really!

For me, and I suspect for the vast majority of other people, this is a list which grows as you go through it. In fact, there is only one song that I can confidently place in section 1 (“Another Day in Paradise” by Phil Collins if you are interested). There are a few songs I can place in section 2. More than that in section 3. And plenty in section 4. Most of these last ones will be songs that I have never heard, or not heard often, whilst those in 2 and 3 will be songs that I hear regularly.

Now, I have no empirical evidence for this statement, but I suspect that the vast majority of people will recognise that their own experience of this is quite similar. There will be some; professional musicians, those with eidetic memories, and those who are much more heavily invested in music than I am; who will, of course, have a much larger list in section 1 than me. But for the everyday person who enjoys music without being devoted to it, I would be willing to bet that these four categories ring true. And the key difference, for me, between sections 1 and 2 or 3 can be summed up by one word: cue.

It is simple really. When I hear certain tunes, my brain is cued to retrieve the lyrics of the song along with the tune. In cognitive psychology terms, the desired memory (the lyrics) have been associated with an appropriate stimulus (the tune of the song) sufficiently during the encoding phase of my memory of the lyrics that when I hear the tune the memory of at least some of the lyrics comes to the fore. Even the (for me) one song that sits in section 1 is somewhat like this; although I can recall the lyrics perfectly I do so by singing the song in my head – the words and the tune (or at least the rhythm of the song) are inseparable in my memory.

I can offer some evidence of this from the popular TV show, “Never Mind the Buzzcocks”. The last round in this show (for those that haven’t seen it) is called “next lines”, where the host Greg Davies (in its most recent incarnation) reads out a line from a song and the panel of contestants have to provide the next line. It is very common for a panel to fail to do this, even when the person who sang the song is on the panel. The cues for them to recall it are simply not there. Many other times, the members of the panel have to sing the song to themselves to cue the memory of the next lines.

In teaching however, one of our big goals is for students to retrieve information given little or no cue, or in situations where the stimuli are not the same as they were during the encoding phase of the memory to be retrieved. Students learn a particular piece of knowledge in one context, but then are asked to recall and apply it in many different contexts – they are asked to reproduce the song lyrics without the tune. Even worse, they are asked to reproduce the song lyrics whilst a different tune is playing. I know there will be many people out there with experience of the difficulty here – trying to recall the words of a song but being unable to because a different song is playing in the background. But that is precisely what we are often aiming for in teaching; transference of the knowledge or skills we teach into different contexts or domains. And this is a big reason why students find it much more challenging to recall what we teach than to sing a long to their favourite songs.

This isn’t to say that there aren’t useful things we can take away from kids’ ability to sing along. If we can identify useful cues for memory retrieval that are, perhaps less context specific, and get our students to associate them with the knowledge to be retrieved, this can be helpful. To this day I can’t hear the word “trigonometry” without thinking of the phrase “Some Officers Have, Curly Auburn Hair, 'Til Old Age” (the mnemonic that I was taught nearly 30 years ago to help remember which trig function is used with each pair of sides in a right-triangle). Of course, this is only helpful when I recognise something as requiring trigonometry (which, fortunately, I can do quite well now) – it doesn’t help me if the context is not one where I would think to use trigonometry in the first place.

There are also things we can take away by reflecting on what helps those songs (or in my case, song) get into category 1. In my case, a key one I can identify is that the song tells a story. Much has been written about the power of story telling in learning, and I think that definitely plays a role in why the lyrics to “Another Day in Paradise” are so memorable to me. Another aspect of the song is the chunked nature (again, something written about extensively in education circles). Each verse is only 4 lines long, and each line is only between 3 and 10 words – most of them very short words. There are probably other properties of the song that make it more memorable that a musician could identify that I cannot, but I do think these two have a particularly strong impact.

So, the next time someone says “Why can kids learn the lyrics to so many songs, but can’t remember…” or maybe tries to use it to justify increasing the “fun” in a lesson, you can answer them with “It is probably only because they are only trying to retrieve that knowledge when they have strong cues to help them. We are trying to get them to retrieve and apply that knowledge across many contexts so it will always be more challenging for us.”