Cremate me to the sound of Disco Inferno! What song do you want to die to?

We frame our lives with music, celebrating birthdays and anniversaries to curated playlists, labouring over tracks to give birth to. But when we’re dying, which songs do we want to hear? And why don’t we choose our own funeral songs?

On 29 January, at the monthly Science Museum Late event in London, a talk called What’s Your #MyLastSong?, hosted by terminal-illness charity Marie Curie, explores these discombobulating questions. Attendees will nominate their ultimate last songs online through the #MyLastSong hashtag; they’ll then be played on a vintage jukebox on stage and discussed by a duo with intimate knowledge of the subject: consultant in palliative medicine Mark Taubert and 6 Music DJ Gideon Coe.

“Talking about dying is the last taboo, but talking about music is different,” says Taubert. He should know. As well as working in hospitals and cancer care centres in Cardiff, he wrote to the late David Bowie in January 2016 about a conversation he had with a dying patient, and the letter went viral. It was retweeted by Bowie’s son Duncan Jones, read by Jarvis Cocker and Benedict Cumberbatch at Letters Live and turned into a classical music composition for Radio 3 by composer John Uren. It discussed how Bowie’s last album, Blackstar, helped doctor and patient “communicate very openly about death, something many doctors and nurses struggle to introduce as a topic of conversation”. It also enabled his patient to convey the vision of her own dying moments: “You gave her a way of expressing this most personal longing to me, a relative stranger.”

“Something happens when we talk about the music we love: it’s more abstract, made by people who feel close to you, but not so close that you can’t discuss them,” Taubert says today. Music being played in a hospital or hospice or at home can also be a great comfort, he says, as hearing is often preserved as our other faculties deteriorate. “Patients’ eyes are often closed, so senses such as hearing mean much more. Music still alters neurotransmissions in the brain, and acts on dopamine and serotonin levels like antipsychotic drugs or antidepressants can with many patients.”

Music and memory are also closely connected in brain activity, which is why songs from childhood or our teenage years are often chosen when people have the capacity to do so. “There’s also an idea that the rooms people die in have to be solemn and quiet, but the sounds of hospitals are usually beeps, squeaky trolley wheels and drip alarms. Music can take us out of that, take us somewhere else.”

A lifelong music obsessive, Coe knows the power music can have. He became involved in What’s Your #MyLast Song? because his brother works for Marie Curie; the experience of a family member last year also brought its topic home. “He was critically ill, and we read books to him, talked to him, but at no point did we think, ‘Let’s play some songs.’ But of course you should. Thankfully, he recovered, so now we can ask him what he’d want, rather than avoid that conversation.”

The reticence to broach death with relatives is common. However, Marie Curie research showed that 82% of people would be comfortable talking about their own end-of-life wishes. Only 36% of those surveyed had had conversations, and just 25% had made plans. Marie Curie’s Talkabout campaign hopes to address this disparity.

Funeral music will also be explored at the event. Coe has been enjoying choices for cremations, such as the Trammps’ Disco Inferno and AC/DC’s Highway to Hell. This week, Bastille’s Good Grief and Billie Eilish’s When the Party’s Over made the top five in a list of millennials’ choices by life insurance comparison site Reassured, while pop perennials such as Bette Midler’s Wind Beneath My Wings and Robbie Williams’ Angels featured in Co-op Funeralcare’s latest survey.

Coe wrestles with some of the songs people choose, though. “I suffer from being over-analytical. Listen to My Way (Co-op Funeralcare’s No 1 last summer): that’s not about you. It’s very much a song about Frank [Sinatra] by way of Paul Anka. A choice being ego-driven at a funeral is probably justified, though.”

Has he considered his choices? “For the funeral, maybe an instrumental. Tom Waits’ Closing Time, perhaps. Or some heavy dub reggae to go with the acoustics of the building.”

Taubert’s last songs are also surprising. “You’d think I’d be into escapism,” he laughs. Not so. He’s thought about Current 93’s 2018 album Light Is Leaving Us All and “the sadder moments of Joy Division” for his dying moments. For the funeral, he says, it’s important to think of the people who will be there and he’d probably go for the Doors’ Soul Kitchen, which he loved as a teenager.

“It’s also important not to think of a death song to play as you’re dying, but death songs,”, he says, “because predicting the precise moment of death is very hard. But it’s more important to remember our responses to music don’t change much. Music still gets to us in our last moments. It reminds us we’re human.”

• What’s Your #MyLastSong? is at Medicine Late at the Science Museum, London, on 29 January.