I noticed that there is something there about vocal compared to visual. Some years ago while messing around memorizing/reciting pi, I always thought I imagined the numbers visually and recited from there. I'm bilingual and a friend asked if I can do it in my mother tongue. It was weird, I was surprised I was struggling. I definitely recite(in my head) in English, then I visualize the numbers than I translate.
It was surprising because when I was even younger I thought I had a photographic memory, I noticed it got weak over time and with memorizing some of pi I thought I was bringing it back. And here I find it was mainly vocal. With the points brought up here for oral tradition, it makes sense that vocal memory has stayed strong.
I wonder if it’s mostly about the cardinality of the options.
Songs are made up of only a few discrete notes, but strung together, but visual memory doesn’t really have a good analog. Pixels? That’s not how we think. Maybe there is a way to remember a visual scene, the closest I can think of is the memory palace technique, and it’s just damn hard to hone, but it really is effective.
I think the trickiest thing is error correction. In a song, a missed note is a riff, and likely close to the real note, in memory palace, there’s a risk it’s just way off and even that being way off fucks up the next step in recall, with no way to repair it.
It was surprising because when I was even younger I thought I had a photographic memory, I noticed it got weak over time and with memorizing some of pi I thought I was bringing it back. And here I find it was mainly vocal. With the points brought up here for oral tradition, it makes sense that vocal memory has stayed strong.