The lifetime soundtrack ‘on the move’: Music, autobiographical memory and mobilities

Abstract

Music can easily become associated with many activities in everyday life, often recorded within personal memory archives, sometimes maintaining a personal meaning across the lifetime. This article convenes on the interactions between music, memory and mobilities, as it explores the recollection of musical memories that incorporate both music mobilities and corporeal mobilities related to personal travel and movement. Drawing on empirical interview data, this research seeks to understand how music can both accompany and signify acts of ‘being mobile’, where unique conditions of time and space provide for the formation of musical memories. Concurrently, the article considers how autobiographical remembering is affected by the dual activities of music listening and travel, through the conceptual lens of the ‘lifetime soundtrack’. Contrasting with previous research, the memory narratives presented here reveal diversity in the way music, memory and mobilities are simultaneously enacted, and looks to the long-term significance such memories may hold for individuals.