Abstract
<p>Humans abstract away from sensory features to form invariant representations of external stimuli, but relatively little is understood about this process in naturalistic audition. Popular music is a common and complex auditory stimulus that is often intertwined with long-term memory and life narratives, offering a unique opportunity to study the mapping from perception to higher-order cognition. We took advantage of a rich, naturally occurring comparison–popular songs versus cover versions, which share a core “song identity” but vary in low-level features–to test the influence of auditory and emotional features on holistic song perception and music-evoked autobiographical memory. In Study 1, we found that a range of auditory features (most critically, tempo and acoustic modulation energy) influenced holistic perceptual representations of songs, as measured by similarity judgments. In Study 2, we found that different levels of song processing drove different aspects of music-evoked autobiographical memories: perceptual features influenced the likelihood of a memory's retrieval, whereas reinstatement of memory details (i.e., vividness) was more strongly linked to core song identity. Taken together, these results provide a new understanding of how complex features of real-world sounds are hierarchically integrated from perception to long-term autobiographical memory.</p>