Argument
Only when I felt lost in my life did I try to record and savor moments that happened every day, but here’s one exception. Music tracks catch a person’s attention even while they are engaging with their life, and, serendipitously, become fragments of my vanishing time even without their notice. When I compose my own music, it then becomes the key to retrieve the memories, and that makes my life meaningful.
Janata, Petr, et al. “Characterisation of Music-Evoked Autobiographical Memories.” Memory, vol. 15, no. 8, 2007, pp. 845–860. Taylor & Francis Online, https://doi.org/10.1080/09658210701734593.
This article literally demonstrates the Music-Evoked Autobiographical Memories (MEAMs) by conducting an experiment of 329 UCD students with 1515 pop music tracks that were popular during their teenage years. The result is that 30% of the tracks successfully evoked one of 3 different memories (lifetime period, general events, or event-specific knowledge) with a strong association with positive emotions. I want to use this article directly since it necessarily supports a large part of my argument, and a psychological experiment is a credible procedure to support the scientific aspect of this philosophical idea as well.