Belfi and colleagues test whether the unusual episodic richness of music-evoked autobiographical memories can be explained simply by their tendency to arise involuntarily. By comparing memories elicited by musical and face cues while distinguishing voluntary from involuntary retrieval, the study separates cue type from retrieval intentionality. Music-evoked memories remained more episodically rich and contained more perceptual detail than face-evoked memories even when involuntary memories were compared directly across cue types. Involuntary retrieval itself increased internal detail, but it did not eliminate the music effect. The conceptual result is important because spontaneity and musical specificity cannot be collapsed into a single mechanism. Music appears to contribute something beyond effortless access, plausibly through its temporal, perceptual, emotional and contextual organisation. Methodologically, the paper exemplifies controlled decomposition of a seemingly unitary phenomenon into independent dimensions. It bridges music cognition with episodic-memory research by showing that retrieval mode and sensory cue jointly shape the phenomenology of autobiographical remembering.