I don’t know if this is a universal thing or just me, but I suspect there are many others that experience this same phenomenon. Even if a song is already firmly ingrained in my head and I know it like the back of my hand, as soon as another song is being played out loud in the background – even if it’s one I have no interest in or am not consciously paying attention to – I will ‘forget’ how the first one goes (by that I mean usually my mind goes blank when trying to recall the melody or chord progression).
Is there a fundamental reason for this? Perhaps it’s somehow a quirk linked to our ancient survival instincts whereby the human brain stops whatever it was doing to instead focus on auditory stimuli (i.e. potential threats) in the surrounding environment? Or maybe some of our brains just aren’t powerful enough to focus well enough on two songs playing at once, in the same way that it’s hard to focus on two or more conversations people around you are having?
In: Biology
What you’re describing is a form of cognitive interference. Basically, you are experiencing difficulty with recall from long term memory because your current cognitive experience is interfering with your ability to recall that specific memory.
In the case of the song, rhythm and rhyming lyrics have always had a very strong influence on the human mind’s ability to recall from long term memory. For millennia human knowledge was passed down strictly from memory in this form. It’s effective at engaging and enforcing memory, which is part of why hearing it prevents us from recalling anything except what we’re listening to right now.
We experience cognitive interference in other ways, like when we’re exhausted or really hungry or very stressed about something. We find it hard to effectively recall from long term memory any time there’s something occupying our cognitive experience. People who experience bad tinnitus, for example, tend to experience declines in memory recall.
You can overcome this difficulty through practice. Practicing cognitive recall in different conditions can improve your ability to perform. Broadway performers, for example, become adept at singing one song while another performer sings a different song right beside them at the same time.
It’s a difficult thing to do, but you can train to hear multiple melodies. But the stronger force is what we call tonality, that is music that has a tonic, or home pitch or key. We are strongly trained to hear tonal music, where there is a definite home, or target, or tonic (Tonic means rest, cure medicine… think tonic water).
Some people will use the term atonal to describe music that doesn’t do this, but I consider the term pejorative, since it implies that there is no system. Instead, the term post-tonal is more inclusive and can describe the different systems explored in the 20th century.
You might want to research bitonality, which is an interesting concept. Charles Ives is one of the first cited advocates, and since his father was a band director who participated in parades, young Charles encountered the phenomenon of one band fading out in one key, and another approaching in a different key.
You could start by studying counterpoint, the study of two or more melodies interacting. The supreme genre of this is the fugue, e.g. many works by Bach. You can focus on hearing competing melodies (albeit in the same key) in such works as The Art of the Fugue, and the Well Tempered Klavier. Kunst Das Fugue is the most important.
This is a very narrow world view, and does not account for music of other cultures; it is how prevalent the music of dead German white guys is. But tonal music is the sandbox most of us live in. The strength of tonality is overpowering, unless you were raised in a fundamentally rhythmic environment (c.f. drumming of west Africa especially Ghana).
But mostly the answer to your question is that tonality is very strong, and once a new song asserts is new key (by a dominant/tonic relationship) it takes over your sense of home.
I don’t know if it’s like this for others but I can very easily hum the tune of a song, or sing the words, while listening to another one, a thing that my gf says is impossible for her to do. I found that weird, like she can’t just switch channels in her head.
Maybe it’s related but I have adhd and life is very much like that all the time. Many channels, all at once. In public I can’t help but notice everything and every conversation around me, which I thought was normal for a long time.
Weirdly, on at least a couple of occasions I have found myself listening to both music *and a podcast* at the same time, just by accident.
I don’t think I was getting much of the podcast at all but it’s just weird (and hilarious) that somewhere in my brain I thought putting some music on while listening to one was a great thing to do. GF walked in the room and was like ‘what are you doing?’
Even as I write this I’ve had the 80s song [‘Be Near Me](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9xmSK1DJeTg&ab_channel=CalVid)’, by ABC, rolling around in my head, I can recall the lyrics perfectly but have no idea when the last time I heard it was, it could be a decade ago… ‘The message is perfectly simple….the meaning is clear..’ Maybe it was playing in a store or elevator or something, somewhere, more recently.
To be honest I don’t think this is a proven fact of life. I remember once I was able to get away from the house and go to the bar with friends like in old days. The bar was playing some trashy kpop I think. And in my mind I kept hearing “one little two little three little Indians” because that’s what my son was listening to that afternoon.
With that in mind, maybe it’s like how you can’t draw a square with one hand and a circle with another. In many ways we all have one-track minds that can only concentrate on one thing at a time.
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