Thematically related is the music of The Caretaker. It's haunting and beautiful and quite memorable. Check out An Empty Bliss Beyond This World[0], which is kind of a nice album for some melancholy reflection on age and the experience of dementia. His final 6-album sequence, Everywhere At The End Of Time[1], is less accessible, particularly the final 3 albums which are mostly noise (the whole 6-hour work was a terrifying listening challenge on TikTok a few years ago).

[0] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LL998ajnjN4

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/An_Empty_Bliss_Beyond_This_Wor...

[1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wJWksPWDKOc

It's well known fact among those who have anything to do with retirement homes: really old people with severe dementia and other such ailments have no problem recalling music, their favorite songs, etc.

Clive Wearing comes to mind. He has a ~7-30s memory, but can perform and conduct complex pieces lasting minutes without interruption.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Clive_Wearing

An ex girlfriend’s grandfather had Lewis body dementia and was constantly telling her that he could hear perfectly and entirely songs from his childhood, songs he hadn’t heard in decades.

Amazing that they’re still in there somewhere.

Certain memorisation techniques leverage innate human abilities. For example, if you want to memorise a shopping list, mentally picture the items as waypoints on a route you know well, then when you want to recall the list, mentally walk the route in your head, visualising the items. Our ability to recall routes taken is probably as good as our music recollection. If I said to you to mentally walk the route from the front door of your childhood house to the nearest shop (or significant location) then you could do it easily.

This clearly taps into our ability to find our way back to the cave after going out hunting for food. Our ability to memorise the route home was necessary to survive.

I read somewhere that early language was more tonal. Closer to singing than the defined words we use now. So, perhaps our ability to memorise music was actually an innate ability to remember early stories or facts shared with the group? Again, leading to increased survival chances.

Should we memorize everything in song form?

Side question: I'm curious, what is a "feminist music scientist" exactly? How does her research differ from other music scientists'?

Edit: It's actually a whole lab at her university, it seems. Their publications: https://sarahasauve.wixsite.com/femslab/publications