You know when a song is all you think about – and you just can’t get it out of your head?
A new study on earworms reveals what makes a song loop in your brain and how you can shake it off.
A researcher from the University of New South Wales’ arts and media school has found earworms – or “involuntary musical imagery” – wriggle into our brains when we’re relaxed.
And certain songs are more successful not because they’re “catchy” tunes, but because they’re repetitive and because our brains are familiar with them.
Author of the study published in the journal Music & Science, Prof Emery Schubert, said the most reported earworms are the choruses of songs.
“Most research on earworms to date analyses what’s in the hook – the short riff or passage to catch the ear of the listener,” he said. “But what hasn’t been considered is that the hook is invariably repeated in the music, most commonly in the chorus.
“The implication is that earworms might not have anything to do with the musical features at all. It largely doesn’t matter what the music is, as long as repetition is part of the music structure.”
But the repetition is only one part of the equation. There are several preconditions for an earworm to occur, including recency and familiarity with the music. And to activate an earworm, we must also be in what’s called a “low-attentional state”, according to the study.
“It’s sometimes referred to as mind wandering, which is a state of relaxation,” Schubert said. “In other words, if you’re deeply engaged with the environment you are in, really concentrating on a task, then you won’t get an earworm.”
People often find earworms quite pleasant, Schubert said, but they can be like a bad romance when the music itself is disliked.
He said studying earworms could help solve questions about consciousness and how material is organised and recalled.
In the article Involuntary, Limited and Contiguously Repeating Musical Imagery (InLaCReMI): Reconciling theory and data on the musical material acquired by earworms, Schubert distinguishes between a “mindpop”, when a piece of music appears in the mind once and an earworm or “involuntary musical imagery”, when a fragment of music is repeated at least once and possibly many times.
“The spontaneous, involuntary, innocuous, non-psychotic appearance of a music fragment heard in one’s mind, without the same music sounding simultaneously in the environment, is now believed to be a common experience,” he writes.
InLaCReMI can be at least partly consciously controlled. If it can’t, “the experience may be seen as slipping into psychosis”.
“You may be able to wrap up an earworm by either finishing off the music, consciously thinking of another piece of music, or by removing yourself from the triggers, such as words or memories that relate to the music or lyrics,” Schubert said.
The article refers to a previous study that found Lady Gaga’s Bad Romance is one of the most persistent earworms. Gotye’s Somebody That I Used to Know and Queen’s Bohemian Rhapsody were also listed as songs that will not let you go, as was Kylie Minogue’s Can’t You Out of My Head.
