How I use music to remember phone numbers

Quite literally.

The spoiler’s in the title so let me get right to it. I don’t have the best memory in the world by a long shot, so I’m constantly searching for ways to remember that work for me. I’ve tried a bunch of memory techniques like the peg system and the memory palace — famously used by Hannibal Lecter in the brilliant Hannibal book-series by Thomas Harris. These are all great techniques, no doubt, but I wasn’t having much fun using them. Music, on the other hand, I find supremely enjoyable. The logical thing then, I thought, was to make my own method of memorisation that relied on music.

I couldn’t make a huge system out of theoretical possibilities. It was necessary to try everything in practice and see what worked. My biggest problems were always names and phone numbers. I could never remember either well. I tried addressing phone numbers (punny XD) first (More about names in an unrelated, future post).

My first instinct was to assign a note or pitch value to each digit and remember the phone number as a melody. I haven’t developed perfect pitch yet (the ability to remember exact pitch values like C, F-sharp or D-flat) but I can easily identify a pitch from a reference pitch (relative pitch). That means that if I choose a root note (base note/reference note), I can tell what any other note is almost instantaneously. It’s nothing I can be proud of — this is a basic skill that musicians develop in tonal music, which covers almost all music we hear. It had taken me a while to develop this ability and it wasn’t without struggle. While learning it though, I also figured out an easy way for people to learn it, which seems to have worked wonders with my students (Note to self: I should write a post about the quick-and-direct way to learn relative pitch in the near future).

The process I was using for phone numbers was a standard encode-and-decode. Encoding was easy enough. You see a digit and convert it to the pitch to which it is mapped. Join all the digit-pitches of the phone number together and you have a melody. Decoding needs a good command of relative pitch; this system works well when you can quickly process pitches. Converting a pitch you understand into a digit then takes no effort at all. This way you’ve successfully recalled a number using a melody.

Having learned music mostly in a Hindustani classical context, I use the solfege system of {Sa, Re, Ga, Ma, Pa, Dha, Ni} instead of {C, C-sharp, D…, B} or the western solfege system of {Do, Re, Mi, Fa, So, La, Ti}. We always think in the language most comfortable to us right? It’s important to remember that you can use any system to learn relative pitch. Whether we call a cat, a cat or a dog or a bull, it still continues looking like a cat to our eyes. The perception of relative pitch is important — not how we name it.

The system I first used to encode numbers into pitches was:

1 — Sa

2 — Re

3 — Ga

4 — Ma

5 — Pa

6 — Dha

7 — Ni

That still left me with three more digits. The notes I had used so far were within the same octave.

[For those who know about octaves, feel free to skip the bracketed parts. Others, please read on.

Let me try explaining the concept of an octave without including physics. To experience it directly, find a piano (or a piano app) and play the 1st black key in a group of 2 black keys anywhere on the piano. Then play another black key that’s also the 1st in the another group of 2 to the right or left. These two notes you’re playing are an octave apart. For guitar players, play an open string and play the twelfth fret on the same string to hear two notes an octave apart. Sa to Sa is an octave, so is Re to Re, Ga to Ga and so on. Similarly, C# to the next C# — octave apart.

When a note is sounded and we increase the pitch, and the sound becomes shriller, we’ll end up reaching a note that sounds the most consonant with the original note compared to any other note upto that point. We hear a resonance that makes the new note seem just like a higher version of the old note. These two notes are an octave apart. We can go up and down in either direction to find notes 2, 3 and more octaves apart from the original note. An octave is a range of pitches. Sa to Sa is an octave. Also, the lower Sa and Re are within the same octave.]

To pitch-convert the remaining 3 digits, all I had to do was use notes in the next octave.

8 — Sa^

9 — Re^

0 — Ga^

I’m using ^ to signify notes in a higher octave.

This seemed like a good starting point and I began applying what I had so far to phone numbers.

Let’s try an example using a fake number: 6733085794. This would become Dha-Ni-Ga-Ga-Ga^-Sa^-Pa-Ni-Re^-Ma. First, I imagine a random pitch in my head and choose that as my root note, Sa. With relative pitch, it takes a second to sing the phone number’s melody. Now I don’t need to remember the numbers at all. All I need is to remember the melody.

Now it might seem like I’ve taken the problem in one domain and translated it to another where it continues to be a problem. Let me show you why I think that this is not the case and how it’s actually easier to remember it this way.

In one question: is it easier to remember number sequences or is it easier to remember songs?

For me and many others, the answer turns out to be songs. Why?

Speaking from my own experience, remembering a song doesn’t feel like a conscious process of remembering but more of a reminiscence of an emotional journey. It’s quite effortless that way. I don’t recall ever spelling out and remembering every single note and beat in a song. Instead I just take it in as a whole. The sound of the song remains in my head as a journey through time that I can relive at a moment’s notice. It’s much more enjoyable and effective than micromanaging every part of the song into memory, something we try to do with number sequences.

I agree that the phone number above hasn’t turned into a full-blown song. It’s just a snippet — a melody that looks like it lacks emotional appeal in every way imaginable. It’s as dry as dry can get in music. This was just my first attempt at this system though. It had taken all of 5 minutes of effort to get to this point. I had to expand this to make it worth using. To do that, I had to make the melody sound memorable. What could I change?

One idea I had was to divide the number into chunks so that each part was a phrase that led to the next part. This needed some creativity when it came to deciding where to split the number and how many phrases should be there. More than 3 phrases never really worked out for me personally.

This approach ended up making hardly any difference to how much I could connect with a melody, so I tried something else. I began to relate phone number melodies to songs I already know. Again, this approach didn’t get me much either.

There was one thing I hadn’t used yet — rhythm. I was listening to the melodies in my head as straight notes, like buttons being pressed at an assembly line. The moment I introduced rhythm, things began to look up. The melody had more character now. It jumped and twisted in ways that made it easier to remember.

The rhythm was arbitrary to start with. I had no formula for it and I didn’t want to make the system any more complex by making rhythm depend on the numbers in any way. So while rhythm helped hugely, I had no inspiration for each rhythm that I used. It was a random mess that worked well a lot of the time.

And that’s when it hit me. Phone numbers are not useful by themselves. They belong to someone; someone who you wanted to call or text using the number. The entire communications network would be a rather pointless endeavour if all a phone number did was dance to its own melody. This gave me my inspiration for deciding the rhythm, and as a side benefit, for understanding how to split the number into phrases.

Suppose I wanted to remember a friend’s phone number: 2740969311 (so fake). This would turn into Re-Ni-Ma-Ga^-Re^-Dha-Re^-Ga-Sa-Sa. Instead of forcing a melody into my head, the first thing I’d do is think about that friend. How does he walk? How does he talk? What are his mannerisms? What music does he like? What language is he most comfortable with? I’d try to make a mental picture of him in my head. Then I’d use that inspiration and apply a rhythm to the melody that fit the character portrait of my friend. If he spoke very slowly and thoughtfully, I would make the rhythm grand and majestic, moving slowly like a great big elephant: TaKaDheem---Ta-Dheem---TaDheem--Dheem--Ta-Ta- (To understand what in the world just happened here, please read How I improved my sense of rhythm: Part 1, Part 2, Part 3 & Part 4). If he were energetic and chirpy, I might use a fast triplet rhythm with a bouncy up-beat: Ta-Ka-KiTa-Ta-TaKiTaTa-Ka.

The exact rhythm was not important. The point was to join the image of my friend to the melody using a rhythm that made that relationship as hard to miss as his huge chin. Sometimes, I’d forget the exact rhythm but because I had the general picture in my head, the notes came up like my friend was singing them in his voice.

There are many ways to tweak this system to fit your own needs, and once you do, you don’t need to limit yourself to phone numbers. You can memorise credit card numbers, bank account numbers and even the digits of pi.

I know it’s easy to store all this on your phone and retrieve it at the touch of a button. Still, I just wanted to improve my memory. And who doesn’t want a good memory? Memory doesn’t need to be accessed in the same, boring way all the time. You can change it up by creating your own systems. The point of this post so far isn’t to make you use this system. It’s to show you that improving memory can be a creative process that you initiate in your own unique way. Of course, if you really like music and connect with it, be my guest and try out the pitch system for yourself.

There’s more to it than I’ve talked about so far. What if you wanted to remember your dad’s, mom’s and sister’s phone numbers? Of course, you could just create 3 separate tunes, associate them with character traits and be done with it. In the long-term, even this becomes cumbersome. Instead you can join these 3 melodies to form a single, long melody. It’s easy to remember than small snippets of disconnected melodies. Also, this way you’re sure that you can recall all family numbers with just one line of melody. This kind of grouping can be applied to people in your band, colleagues in your team or even your set of debit card numbers. You can use the individual person-rhythms, like we’ve done already, for this longer tune or you can use a rhythm that makes the entire melody memorable to you as a whole.

There’s another ultra-creative thing you can do to make this system almost bulletproof — add lyrics to the tunes you have. You can literally have a friends theme song of your own (pun intended). Once you have a melody that contains the numbers of your 5 best friends, add lyrics that describe your friends’ qualities or a particularly memorable event all of you remember, or even just their names. This gives you a small song complete with lyrics, which you can recollect with ease. You always know what the song is about and what numbers it encodes. Helpful tip: something I’ve learned over time is that the funnier or more outrageous the lyrics are, the easier it becomes to recollect them.

I know this might seem like too much to do for memorising a bunch of plain old numbers you can get from your contacts list, but thinking of this as a way to explore your latent (or full-blown) creativity can make it quite addictive. Even the learning curve can be a way to test how fast you can recall relative pitches.

This kind of activity exercises your creativity while also having the added benefit of improving memory recall.

There are a whole load of tweaks you could make. See what shape it takes. Experiment and find your own systems.

A cool thing that happens after some time with this method is that you begin to see phone numbers not as digit-sequences but as melodies. This becomes your direct experience of them. You begin to think of phone numbers as joyful, scary or depressing based on the melodies they generate. You see similarities in phone numbers from the similar sound of their tunes. You even begin to go into the no-man’s land of judging numbers as good or bad, harmonising different phone numbers and deciding the best phone numbers a set of people need to make a great melody. It’s a kind of feedback loop; an acquired sense with which you create an imagined world of your own. Maybe this is what music is as well. The sound is objective but our subjective experience is what makes it music. I think this is what martial-arts teachers talk about when they say that the art becomes a way of thinking and a way of experiencing life.

After getting comfortable with this method of remembering numbers, I understood that it wasn’t the specific approach of using music that helped me but it was more about the methods I used along the way. If I could relate numbers to emotions directly, why would I need music to remember any of this? It’d be easier, more direct, and frankly, more sensible to continue to use numbers. Music is not some ethereal medium that is solely the best. It’s about how we relate to it and how we use that to aid our recall. Maybe many people, including me, find it easier to do this with music. That’s not to say we can’t emotionally experience numbers. Many genius savants are known to have this almost superhuman ability. The rest of us just need to figure out how to get there. I have only some ideas on how to achieve this, using the same methods I used to develop my musical ability. I’m nowhere close to understanding how to “feel” numbers but I’m sure there are many people who have developed ways to do it. If you’re one of them, I’d love to learn how you did it.

Remember how a phone’s keypad makes 3 sounds when you press the numbers? A low pitch for 1, 4 and 7; a middle pitch for 2, 5, 8 and 0; and a high pitch for 3, 6 and 9? That was my original inspiration to create this memory system. Observe what inspires you as a unique individual and use it to explore your creativity. And if you find something, let me know about it. We can all use the inspiration.

_/\_

Around Sound turns my personal experiences with music, both as a musician and as a listener, into stories.

Follow my 4-part series on rhythm (How I improved my sense of rhythm: Part 1, Part 2, Part 3, Part 4) to read about my journey through the world of rhythm. As an added benefit, you can improve your sense of rhythm too :)

You might even find these interesting: A Recipe for Music or The Voice of a Story.

You can have a look at all my articles here: Anirudh Venkatesh