Zoltán Kékesi, cultural historian at the Centre for Collective Violence, Holocaust and Genocide Studies at University College London, is in conversation with Kelly Jakubowski, Associate Professor in Music Psychology at Durham University, to talk about the psychology of musical memories. They discuss how music shapes our memories, especially when music was experienced in the context of Nazi organisations and events. Why does music tend to evoke much more positive than negative emotions regardless of the emotion the music is expressing? And what is the ‘reminiscence bump’?

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Zoltán Kékesi's research evolves around “Final Account: Third Reich Testimonies”, a collection of interviews by British documentary filmmaker Luke Holland. Between 2008 and 2017, Holland interviewed German and Austrian, non-Jewish men and women who as children and adolescents had joined the Hitler Youth or League of German Girls. To trigger memories, he asked interviewees to sing songs of their childhood. Even when they refused to sing, songs took interviewees back in time and with the songs resurfaced experiences and personal stories of past times. His essay “A Pandora’s Box: The Horst Wessel Song in the Collection ‘Final Account: Third Reich Testimonies’” is available to read here: https://compromised-identities.org/musical-memories/

Kelly Jakubowski’s research examines a range of topics within music psychology and empirical musicology, including memory for music, music-evoked autobiographical memory, musical imagery and imagination, earworms, absolute pitch, musical timing and movement, and cross-cultural music perception. She co-leads Durham’s Music and Science Lab, an interdisciplinary research group united by interests in empirical, computational, and biological approaches to understanding music listening and music making, and she is the Co-Director of Durham’s Centre for Research into Inner Experience.

The episode was produced by Marthe Lisson, editor of Think Pieces, and supported by the https://pearsfoundation.org.uk/