Memory for music can be preserved in the presence of neurodegenerative disorders even when other memories are forgotten. However, understanding how the brain remembers music has proven difficult despite decades of research. The central goal of this thesis was to elucidate the neural correlates of musical memory by exploring how the presence of language and music information affect the way young and older adults remember music. To that end, I 1) used a controlled training paradigm to familiarize participants with novel stimuli that manipulated the presence of language and music, and 2) collected functional magnetic resonance imaging data to compare brain activity in response to stimuli that were identical except for their level of familiarity. First, I compared differences in neural activation based on familiarity in young adults using general linear model (GLM) and multivariate pattern analyses (Chapter 2). Contrary to the results of previous studies, there were no differences in the areas involved in processing novel and familiar music. Next, I used an intersubject synchrony analysis to assess the effect of familiarity on neural synchrony (Chapters 3 and 5). Synchrony is a new technique in the musical memory literature that correlates neural activation timecourses to a stimulus across individuals. Familiarity reduced synchrony in both young and older adults. Synchrony reduction is associated with increased idiosyncratic processing across participants. This reduction occurred after a single listen suggesting that each participant had a unique experience of the stimuli after only a single exposure. Finally, I used GLM and synchrony analyses together to characterize how musical stimuli with and without language are processed by healthy young and older adults (Chapter 4). Brain areas involved in processing music and language stimuli differed based on age group and stimuli, but in both groups language information induced more synchrony than stimuli without language. Altogether, these results suggest that 1) similarities in stimulus processing across individuals are directly related to the presence of language, and 2) the lack of clearly defined neural correlates of musical memory across previous studies may stem from the idiosyncrasies in processing that arise as individuals become familiar with musical stimuli
