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how do we remember tunes?

This turned up when I was looking for some background
on the Radio 4 morning theme (about to be "axed"):

How tunes get stuck in your head   'Agadoo' by Black
Lace had a catchy tune for some
Scientists may have found what makes a tune catchy,
after locating the brain area where a song's "hook"
gets caught.
A US team from Dartmouth College, reported in the
journal Nature, played volunteers tunes with snippets
cut out.
They scanned for brain activity and found it centred
in the auditory cortex - which handles information
from ears.
When familiar tunes played, the cortex activity
continued during the blanks - and the volunteers
indeed said they still mentally "heard" the tunes.
Catchy songs
Researchers have previously argued that catchy songs
work by causing a "brain itch" that can only be
scratched by repeating the tune.
The Dartmouth team asked volunteers to listen to
excerpts from familiar and unfamiliar songs with
lyrics or instrumentals.
These included the Rolling Stones' Satisfaction and
the theme tune from The Pink Panther.
Snippets of the music were removed at different points
during the songs and replaced with silent gaps.
The researchers used a brain scan called functional
magnetic resonance imaging to see which parts of the
brain were active while the volunteers listened to the
tracks.
  The auditory cortex remained active even though the
music had stopped
Lead author David Kraemer
After the experiment, the volunteers reported hearing
a continuation of the song during the silent gaps when
the tune was familiar, but not when the song was
unfamiliar to them.
When the researchers looked at the brain scans they
found the individuals had more activity in specific
regions of the brain during the silent gaps when the
song was familiar, than when it was an unknown tune.
Lyrical focus
These brain areas lie in the auditory cortex, which is
the part that handles information from the ears.
David Kraemer, a graduate student in Dartmouth's
Psychological and Brain Sciences Department who led
the study, said: "We found that people couldn't help
continuing the song in their heads, and when they did
this, the auditory cortex remained active even though
the music had stopped."
The researchers also found whether the music had
lyrics or not affected brain activity to different
degrees.
If the music went quiet during an instrumental song,
like during the theme from the Pink Panther,
individuals activated many different parts of the
auditory cortex, going farther back in the processing
stream, to fill in the blanks.
When remembering songs with words, however, people
simply relied on the more advanced parts of the
auditory processing stream.
"It makes us think that lyrics might be the focus of
the memory," said Mr Kraemer.
Domino effect
Co-researcher Dr Bill Kelley said their findings
confirmed that sensory-specific memories, those linked
to sight, sound or smell for example, are stored in
the brain regions that were involved in processing
that information in the first place.
"But what we did not know until now was whether the
same rules held true for the more complex imagery we
see in everyday life."
He said it was unlikely that memories were stored in
only one particular brain region because they often
involved more than one sensory pathway.
"When you are recalling a particular song that will
activate auditory brain regions but that may, in turn,
lead to you having a very vivid visual memory as well.

"For example, you may picture yourself at the high
school dance when you first heard the song."
He said greater understanding of how memories are
formed and recalled could help researchers
investigating conditions that affect memory. ##

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