Experiencing polyphonic music may enhance memories retention

Background and Aim: Early experience, provide opportunity for later associative experiential learning by affecting multisensory systems. This phenomenon may because of the influences which sensory stimuli as sounds would have on nonauditory neural centers rather than just deploying hearing system, so the question is whether music as a kind of complex sound source, could help in general cognitive functions such as memory circuits or, conversely, it acts as a distracting factor. This study was investigated the effect of auditory experience with special kind of music, called polyphonic music, on auditory, visual and logical memories function. Methods: Forty volunteers with normal hearing, aged 18 to 40 years, were participated in this experimental study. They were performed with Ray auditory verbal learning test, Kim Karad visual memory test, and Wechsler logical memory subtest in two states: nomusic condition and music condition with a polyphonic piece as background music. Memory functions in these two conditions, and the effect of gender on performances, were compared between conditions. Results: Polyphonic music significantly increased auditory, visual and logical memory performance compared with the no-music conditions (p 0.05). No significant difference between genders was found in memory tasks in both music and nomusic conditions (p 0.05). Conclusion: It seems that presence of polyphonic music while people had enough auditory experience about it, impress memory performance. It is possibly owning to multisensory functions of brain and the effect of auditory experiences on cognitive system.