An earworm or brainworm, [1] also described as sticky music or stuck song syndrome, [2] is a catchy or memorable piece of music or saying that continuously occupies a person's mind even after it is no longer being played or spoken about. [3] [4] Involuntary Musical Imagery (INMI) is most common after earworms, [5] [6] [7] [8] [9] but INMI as a label is not solely restricted to earworms; musical hallucinations also fall into this category, although they are not the same thing. [6] [10] Earworms are considered to be a common type of involuntary cognition. [11] Some of the phrases often used to describe earworms include "musical imagery repetition" and "involuntary musical imagery". [1] [12] [13]
The word earworm is a calque from the German Ohrwurm . [14] [15] The earliest known English usage is in Desmond Bagley's 1978 novel Flyaway , where the author points out the German origin of his word. [16]
Researchers who have studied and written about the phenomenon include Theodor Reik, [17] Sean Bennett, [18] Oliver Sacks, [1] Daniel Levitin, [19] James Kellaris, [20] Philip Beaman, [21] Vicky Williamson, [22] Diana Deutsch, [23] and, in a more theoretical perspective, Peter Szendy, [24] along with many more. The phenomenon is distinct from palinacousis, a rare medical condition caused by damage to the temporal lobe of the brain that results in auditory hallucinations. [25]
Researcher Vicky Williamson at Goldsmiths, University of London, found in an uncontrolled study that earworms correlated with music exposure, but could also be triggered by experiences that trigger the memory of a song (involuntary memory) such as seeing a word that reminds one of the song, hearing a few notes from the song, or feeling an emotion one associates with the song. The list of songs collected in the study showed no particular pattern, other than popularity. [2]
According to research by James Kellaris, 98% of individuals experience earworms. Women and men experience the phenomenon equally often, but earworms tend to last longer for women and irritate them more. [26] Kellaris produced statistics suggesting that songs with lyrics may account for 73.7% of earworms, whereas instrumental music may cause only 7.7%. [27]
In 2010, published data in the British Journal of Psychology directly addressed the subject, and its results support earlier claims that earworms are usually 15 to 30 seconds in length and are more common in those with an interest in music. [21] Earworms can occur with either 'positive' or 'negative' music. [11] Positive music in this case is music that sounds happy and/or calm. Negative music is the opposite, where the music sounds angry or sad.
Earworms are not related only to music with lyrics; in a research experiment conducted by Ella Moeck and her colleagues in an attempt to find out if the positive/negative feeling of a piece of music affected earworms caused by that piece, they used only instrumental music. [11] Her experiment determined that all participants experienced a similar quantity of earworms, regardless of the emotional valence, although the quality of the earworm did vary. The earworms born from the negatively valenced music brought about more distress and occurred less frequently than those produced by positively valenced music. [11]
Scientists at Western Washington University found that engaging working memory in moderately difficult tasks such as anagrams, puzzles or reading was an effective way of stopping earworms and of reducing their recurrence. [28] Another publication points out that melodic music has a tendency to demonstrate repeating rhythm which may lead to endless repetition, unless a climax can be achieved to break the cycle. [29]
Research reported in 2015 by the School of Psychology and Clinical Language Sciences at the University of Reading demonstrated that chewing gum could help by similarly blocking the sub-vocal rehearsal component of auditory short-term or "working" memory associated with generating and manipulating auditory and musical images. [30] It has also been suggested to ask oneself why one is experiencing this particular song. [23] Another suggested remedy is to try to find a "cure song" to stop the repeating music. [31] [32]
There are also so-called "cure songs" or "cure tunes" to get the earworm out of one's head. "God Save the King" is cited as a very popular and helpful choice of cure song. [33] "Happy Birthday" was also a popular choice in cure songs. [31]
Listening to the tune in a different/lower tempo or lower pitch, or a remixed version if it exists, can be an antidote. Listening to the tune from start to finish can also help. Since earworms are usually only a fragment of music, playing the tune all the way through can help break the loop. [34]
Jean Harris, who murdered Herman Tarnower, was obsessed with the song "Put the Blame on Mame" by Allan Roberts and Doris Fisher, which she first heard in the film Gilda (1946). She would recall this regularly for over 33 years and could hold a conversation while playing it in her mind. [35]
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Mark Twain's 1876 story "A Literary Nightmare" (also known as "Punch, Brothers, Punch") is about a jingle that one can get rid of only by transferring it to another person.
In 1943 Henry Kuttner published the short story "Nothing but Gingerbread Left" about a song engineered to damage the Nazi war effort, culminating in Adolf Hitler being unable to continue a speech. [36]
In Alfred Bester's 1953 novel The Demolished Man , the protagonist uses a jingle specifically crafted to be a catchy, irritating nuisance as a tool to block mind readers from reading his mind.
In Arthur C. Clarke's 1957 science fiction short story "The Ultimate Melody", a scientist, Gilbert Lister, develops the ultimate melody – one that so compels the brain that its listener becomes completely and forever enraptured by it. As the storyteller, Harry Purvis, explains, Lister theorized that a great melody "made its impression on the mind because it fitted in with the fundamental electrical rhythms going on in the brain." Lister attempts to abstract from the hit tunes of the day to a melody that fits in so well with the electrical rhythms that it dominates them completely. He succeeds and is found in a catatonic state from which he never awakens. [37]
In Fritz Leiber's Hugo Award-nominated short story "Rump-Titty-Titty-Tum-TAH-Tee" (1959), the title describes a rhythmic drumbeat so powerful that it rapidly spreads to all areas of human culture, until a counter-rhythm is developed that acts as an antidote. [38]
In Joe Simpson's 1988 book Touching the Void , he talks about not being able to get the tune "Brown Girl in the Ring" by Boney M out of his head. The book tells of his survival, against the odds, after a mountaineering accident in the remote Siula Grande region of South America. Alone, badly injured, and in a semi-delirious state, he is confused as to whether he is imagining the music or really hearing it. [39]
In the Dexter's Laboratory episode titled "Head Band", a contagious group of viruses force their host to sing what they are saying to the same "boy band" tune. The only way to be cured of the Boy Band Virus is for the viruses to break up and start their own solo careers. [40]
In the SpongeBob SquarePants episode titled “Earworm”, SpongeBob gets the “Musical Doodle” song stuck in his head, giving him an earworm, which ultimately turns out to be an actual worm, which is removed by his friends singing or playing other songs.
In The Lego Movie 2: The Second Part there is a scene in which most of the film's characters are subjected to "Catchy Song" and all except Lucy dance to it, while simultaneously the denizens of Harmony Town sing it to Emmet and Rex. Lucy/Wildstyle avoids being "brainwashed" by the song by breaking one of the speakers and using some of its pieces to build earmuffs for herself before escaping via air ducts, while Emmet and Rex escape in a similar fashion.
E. B. White's 1933 satirical short story "The Supremacy of Uruguay" (reprinted in Timeless Stories for Today and Tomorrow ) relates a fictional episode in the history of Uruguay where a powerful earworm is discovered in a popular American song. The Uruguayan military builds a squadron of pilotless aircraft armed with phonographs playing a highly amplified recording of the earworm, and conquers the entire world by reducing the citizens of all nations to mindless insanity. "[T]he peoples were hopelessly mad, ravaged by an ineradicable noise ... No one could hear anything except the noise in his own head." [41]
In 2014, musician Emperor X wrote a deliberately catchy song titled 10,000-Year Earworm to Discourage Settlement Near Nuclear Waste Repositories (Don't Change Color, Kitty) in reference to the "ray cat" idea in nuclear semiotics, attempting to embed a warning message in folklore that would still be remembered in 10,000 years' time.
In 2023–2024, an "earworm eraser" clip created by Atlassian was popularized on social media. [42]
According to research done in 2016 by Kelly Jakubowski and colleagues, published by the American Psychological Association, there are certain characteristics that make songs more likely to become earworms. Earworm songs usually have a fast-paced tempo and an easy-to-remember melody. However, earworms also tend to have unusual intervals or repetitions that make them stand out from other songs. Earworms also tend to be played on the radio more than other songs and are usually featured at the top of the charts. [43] The chorus of a song is one of the most reported causes of earworms. [44]
The most frequently named earworms during this study were the following:
Kazumasa Negishi and Takahiro Sekiguchi did a study to see if there are specific traits that make a person more or less susceptible to earworms or involuntary musical imagery. [45] The participants in the study were assessed on obsessive-compulsive tendencies, the Big Five personality traits, and musical expertise. Negishi and Sekiguchi found that some of the obsessive-compulsive traits, such as intrusive thoughts, played a role in experiencing earworms while compulsive washing did not. In terms of the Big Five personality traits, neuroticism significantly predicted occurrences of earworms. Musical expertise created an effect of sophistication when it came to earworm occurrences.
One tool used to gather data on involuntary musical imagery (INMI)—and, more specifically, earworms—is called the Involuntary Musical Imagery Scale; it was created with the research compiled from George Floridou, Victoria Williamson, and Danial Müllensiefen. It uses four factors to measure different experiences surrounding earworms and INMI in general. [46] Those four factors include 'Negative Valence', 'Movement', 'Personal Reflections', and 'Help'. [46] Negative Valence is the category that measures the subjective response to the INMI experience. [46] Movement is a relatively new aspect to apply to INMI, it is essentially the INMI experience with accompanied embodied responses, which can include singing, humming, and dancing. [46] Personal Reflections is the occurrence of a personal quality, like unrelated thoughts, associated with the INMI; which are not directly related to the valence of the INMI itself. [46] Help is the category which determines the beneficial and constructive aspects to the INMI experiences, which could potentially reflect similarities in the characteristics of unfocused music listing and task-unrelated thought. [46]
Absolute pitch (AP), often called perfect pitch, is the ability to identify or re-create a given musical note without the benefit of a reference tone. AP may be demonstrated using linguistic labelling, associating mental imagery with the note, or sensorimotor responses. For example, an AP possessor can accurately reproduce a heard tone on a musical instrument without "hunting" for the correct pitch.
Auditory illusions are illusions of real sound or outside stimulus. These false perceptions are the equivalent of an optical illusion: the listener hears either sounds which are not present in the stimulus, or sounds that should not be possible given the circumstance on how they were created.
In the philosophy of mind, neuroscience, and cognitive science, a mental image is an experience that, on most occasions, significantly resembles the experience of "perceiving" some object, event, or scene but occurs when the relevant object, event, or scene is not actually present to the senses. There are sometimes episodes, particularly on falling asleep and waking up, when the mental imagery may be dynamic, phantasmagoric, and involuntary in character, repeatedly presenting identifiable objects or actions, spilling over from waking events, or defying perception, presenting a kaleidoscopic field, in which no distinct object can be discerned. Mental imagery can sometimes produce the same effects as would be produced by the behavior or experience imagined.
Auditory imagery is a form of mental imagery that is used to organize and analyze sounds when there is no external auditory stimulus present. This form of imagery is broken up into a couple of auditory modalities such as verbal imagery or musical imagery. This modality of mental imagery differs from other sensory images such as motor imagery or visual imagery. The vividness and detail of auditory imagery can vary from person to person depending on their background and condition of their brain. Through all of the research developed to understand auditory imagery behavioral neuroscientists have found that the auditory images developed in subjects' minds are generated in real time and consist of fairly precise information about quantifiable auditory properties as well as melodic and harmonic relationships. These studies have been able to recently gain confirmation and recognition due to the arrival of Positron emission tomography and fMRI scans that can confirm a physiological and psychological correlation.
Diana Deutsch is a British-American psychologist from London, England. She is a professor of psychology at the University of California, San Diego, and is a prominent researcher on the psychology of music. Deutsch is primarily known for her discoveries in music and speech illusions. She also studies the cognitive foundation of musical grammars, which consists of the way people hold musical pitches in memory, and how people relate the sounds of music and speech to each other. In addition, she is known for her work on absolute pitch, which she has shown is far more prevalent among speakers of tonal languages. Deutsch is the author of Musical Illusions and Phantom Words: How Music and Speech Unlock Mysteries of the Brain (2019), the editor for Psychology of Music, and also the compact discs Musical Illusions and Paradoxes (1995) and Phantom Words and Other Curiosities (2003).
Amusia is a musical disorder that appears mainly as a defect in processing pitch but also encompasses musical memory and recognition. Two main classifications of amusia exist: acquired amusia, which occurs as a result of brain damage, and congenital amusia, which results from a music-processing anomaly present since birth.
Involuntary memory, also known as involuntary explicit memory, involuntary conscious memory, involuntary aware memory, madeleine moment, mind pops and most commonly, involuntary autobiographical memory, is a sub-component of memory that occurs when cues encountered in everyday life evoke recollections of the past without conscious effort. Voluntary memory, its opposite, is characterized by a deliberate effort to recall the past.
Music psychology, or the psychology of music, may be regarded as a branch of both psychology and musicology. It aims to explain and understand musical behaviour and experience, including the processes through which music is perceived, created, responded to, and incorporated into everyday life. Modern music psychology is primarily empirical; its knowledge tends to advance on the basis of interpretations of data collected by systematic observation of and interaction with human participants. Music psychology is a field of research with practical relevance for many areas, including music performance, composition, education, criticism, and therapy, as well as investigations of human attitude, skill, performance, intelligence, creativity, and social behavior.
In music, tonal memory or "aural recall" is the ability to remember a specific tone after it has been heard. Tonal memory assists with staying in tune and may be developed through ear training. Extensive tonal memory may be recognized as an indication of potential compositional ability.
The Tetris effect occurs when someone dedicates vast amounts of time, effort and concentration on an activity which thereby alters their thoughts, dreams, and other experiences not directly linked to said activity. The term originates from the popular video game Tetris.
An auditory hallucination, or paracusia, is a form of hallucination that involves perceiving sounds without auditory stimulus. While experiencing an auditory hallucination, the affected person hears a sound or sounds that did not come from the natural environment.
Musical memory refers to the ability to remember music-related information, such as melodic content and other progressions of tones or pitches. The differences found between linguistic memory and musical memory have led researchers to theorize that musical memory is encoded differently from language and may constitute an independent part of the phonological loop. The use of this term is problematic, however, since it implies input from a verbal system, whereas music is in principle nonverbal.
Guided imagery is a mind-body intervention by which a trained practitioner or teacher helps a participant or patient to evoke and generate mental images that simulate or recreate the sensory perception of sights, sounds, tastes, smells, movements, and images associated with touch, such as texture, temperature, and pressure, as well as imaginative or mental content that the participant or patient experiences as defying conventional sensory categories, and that may precipitate strong emotions or feelings in the absence of the stimuli to which correlating sensory receptors are receptive.
The neuroscience of music is the scientific study of brain-based mechanisms involved in the cognitive processes underlying music. These behaviours include music listening, performing, composing, reading, writing, and ancillary activities. It also is increasingly concerned with the brain basis for musical aesthetics and musical emotion. Scientists working in this field may have training in cognitive neuroscience, neurology, neuroanatomy, psychology, music theory, computer science, and other relevant fields.
Melodic Learning is a multimodal learning method that uses the defining elements of singing to facilitate the capture, storage and retrieval of information. Widely recognized examples of Melodic Learning include using the alphabet song to learn the alphabet and This Old Man to learn counting.
Catchiness is how easy it is for a song, tune, or phrase to be recalled. It is often taken into account when writing songs, catchphrases, advertising slogans, jingles etc. Alternatively, it can be defined as how difficult it is for one to forget it. Songs that embody high levels of remembrance or catchiness are literally known as "catchy songs" or "earworms". While it is hard to scientifically explain what makes a song catchy, there are many documented techniques that recur throughout catchy music, such as repetition, hooks and alliteration. Selling Sounds: The Commercial Revolution in American Music says that "although there was no definition for what made a song catchy, all the songwriting guides agreed that simplicity and familiarity were vital".
The psychology of music preference is the study of the psychological factors behind peoples' different music preferences. One study found that after researching through studies from the past 50 years, there are more than 500 functions for music. Music is heard by people daily in many parts of the world, and affects people in various ways from emotional regulation to cognitive development, along with providing a means for self-expression. Music training has been shown to help improve intellectual development and ability, though minimal connection has been found as to how it affects emotion regulation. Numerous studies have been conducted to show that individual personality can have an effect on music preference, though a recent meta-analysis has shown that personality in itself explains little variance in music preferences. These studies are not limited to American culture, as they have been conducted with significant results in countries all over the world, including Japan, Germany, Spain, and Brazil.
Lola L. Cuddy is a Canadian psychologist recognized for her contributions to the field of music psychology. She is a professor emerita in the Department of Psychology at Queen's University in Kingston, Ontario.
David Michael Greenberg is a psychologist, neuroscientist, and musician. He is best known for his contributions to personality psychology, social psychology, social neuroscience, music psychology, and autism.
Music-evoked autobiographical memories (MEAMs) refer to the recollection of personal experiences or past events that are triggered when hearing music or some musical stimulus. While there is a degree of inter-individual variation in music listening patterns and evoked responses, MEAMs are generally triggered in response to a wide variety of music, often popular or classical genres, and are estimated to occur in the range from one to a few times per day, regardless of formal instrumental practice or music lessons. Consistent with the hallmarks of general autobiographical memories, everyday MEAMs similarly exhibit a recency effect, a reminiscence bump, and childhood amnesia, encoding autobiographical knowledge at several levels of specificity and across several common social and situational contexts. The phenomenon of MEAMs has been widely studied in the fields of psychology, neuroscience, and musicology. In recent years, the subject has garnered significant interest from researchers and the general public alike due to music's capacity to evoke vivid, emotional, and episodically rich autobiographical memories.
Of the 1,000 respondents, the kind of music respondents said they got stuck on most recently were songs with lyrics for 73.7 percent, jingles or ads for 18.6 percent and an instrumental tune for 7.7 percent.