As a researcher with a background in music performance and composition, I am often asking how the constraints of technology dictate how music is made and heard, and how these parameters influence the way music comes to refer to nonmusical memories. The present study considers the potential for remixes of familiar popular songs to manipulate parameters of music-evoked autobiographical memory, as such music has rapidly populated the sonic landscape. As popular music recordings can be integrated into music therapies in vulnerable populations, it is valuable to consider how dependent MEAMs are on the cue being not just the right song, but right version of the song.

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There is a modest but growing body of work that has established a connection between recorded popular music and autobiographical memory (Befli et al., 2016; Cay et al., 2008; Jakubowski and Ghosh, 2021; Janata et al, 2007) . Researchers have interpreted this relationship to be possibly enhanced by the availability of recordings in everyday life, but also the the fact that they can be replicated exactly when they are replayed. As the human memory process benefits from repeated rememberings and external cues, the capacity to remember the same way with the same cue could reasonably explain how recorded music cues work so well.

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We do know that recordings condition memory for music in that individuals in the general population tend to have an absolute memory for things like pitch and tempo associated with familiar recordings; people notice when something sounds unexpected (Levitin & Cook, 1996; Schellenberg & Trehub, 2003; Van Hedger et al., 2016).

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Consequently, listeners might also be distracted by unexpected versions of familiar songs and not experience music-evoked memories as vividly or positively as studies have shown that they typically do.

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The question that guides my research here is if the development of absolute memory for aspects of recordings interacts with companion autobiographical memory processes. In particular, I ask whether changing playback tempo of pop music audio influences the cueing capacity of that song.

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Based on the research cited above, as well as the responses I received conducting qualitative interviews about encounters with remixes of favorite songs, I hypothesized that exposure to an altered version of a familiar music cue would be somewhat distracting  --although it would still be able to produce autobiographical memories, I expected the retrieval to take longer and the memory to be less positive than ones produced with expected versions.