Background and objectives Music has a unique capacity to evoke both strong emotions and vivid autobiographical memories. Previous music information retrieval (MIR) studies have shown that the emotional experience of music is influenced by a combination of musical features, including tonal, rhythmic, and loudness features. Here, our aim was to explore the relationship between music-evoked emotions and music-evoked memories and how musical features (derived with MIR) can predict them both. Methods Healthy older adults (N = 113, age ≥ 60 years) participated in a listening task in which they rated a total of 140 song excerpts comprising folk songs and popular songs from 1950s to 1980s on five domains measuring the emotional (valence, arousal, emotional intensity) and memory (familiarity, autobiographical salience) experience of the songs. A set of 24 musical features were extracted from the songs using computational MIR methods. Principal component analyses were applied to reduce multicollinearity, resulting in six core musical components, which were then used to predict the behavioural ratings in multiple regression analyses. Results All correlations between behavioural ratings were positive and ranged from moderate to very high (r = 0.46–0.92). Emotional intensity showed the highest correlation to both autobiographical salience and familiarity. In the MIR data, three musical components measuring salience of the musical pulse (Pulse strength), relative strength of high harmonics (Brightness), and fluctuation in the frequencies between 200–800 Hz (Low-mid) predicted both music-evoked emotions and memories. Emotional intensity (and valence to a lesser extent) mediated the predictive effect of the musical components on music-evoked memories. Conclusions The results suggest that music-evoked emotions are strongly related to music-evoked memories in healthy older adults and that both music-evoked emotions and memories are predicted by the same core musical features.

Aging is accompanied by difficulties in auditory information processing, especially in more complex sound environments. Choir singing requires efficient processing of multiple sound features and could, therefore, mitigate the detrimental effects of aging on complex auditory encoding. We recorded auditory event-related potentials during passive listening of sounds in healthy older adult (≥ 60 years) choir singers and nonsinger controls. We conducted a complex oddball condition involving encoding of abstract regularities in combinations of pitch and location features, as well as in two simple oddball conditions, in which only either the pitch or spatial location of the sounds was varied. We analyzed change-related mismatch negativity (MMN) and obligatory P1 and N1 responses in each condition. In the complex condition, the choir singers showed a larger MMN than the controls, which also correlated with better performance in a verbal fluency test. In the simple pitch and location conditions, the choir singers had smaller N1 responses compared to the control subjects, whereas the MMN responses did not differ between groups. These results suggest that regular choir singing is associated both with more enhanced encoding of complex auditory regularities and more effective adaptation to simple sound features.

Review question / Objective: The aim of this systematic review is to identify and evaluate the effectiveness of teleneuropsychological rehabilitation on cognitive, behavioral, and socio-emotional functioning. Information sources: MEDLINE (PubMed), Cochrane library, Web of Science, Scopus and PsycINFO electronic databases. In addition, searches will be supplemented from relevant Finnish electronic databases (Journal.fi; Helda, psykologia.fi., Julkari). Main outcome(s): All outcome measures of cognitive, behavioral, and socio-emotional functioning.

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