According to a new study by the American Psychological Association (APA), “If you’ve found yourself singing along to Lady Gaga‘s ‘Bad Romance’ hours after you switched the radio off, you are not alone. Certain songs do tend to stick in our heads more than others for some very specific reasons, according to research.”
The researchers asked 3,000 people to name their most frequent earworm tunes and compared these to tunes that had never been named as earworms in the database, but were a match in terms of popularity and how recently they had been in the United Kingdom music charts. The melodic features of the earworm and non-earworm tunes were then analyzed and compared. Songs were limited to popular genres, such as pop, rock, rap and rhythm and blues. The data for the study were collected from 2010 to 2013.
The study, published in the APA journal Psychology of Aesthetics, Creativity and the Arts found that the “earworm” effect usually occurs when the songs are “faster, with a fairly generic and easy-to-remember melody but with some particular intervals, such as leaps or repetitions that set them apart from the average pop song.”
Along with “Bad Romance”, songs frequently named by respondents as “earworms” included Journey‘s “Don’t Stop Believing” and, appropriately, Kylie Minogue‘s “Can’t Get You Out Of My Head”.
According to the study’s lead researcher Dr. Kelly Jakubowski, PhD, “These musically sticky songs seem to have quite a fast tempo along with a common melodic shape and unusual intervals or repetitions like we can hear in the opening riff of ‘Smoke On The Water’ by Deep Purple or in the chorus of ‘Bad Romance’. Our findings [also] show that you can, to some extent, predict which songs are going to get stuck in people’s heads based on the song’s melodic content. This could help aspiring song-writers or advertisers write a jingle everyone will remember for days or months afterwards.”
The study also gets more technical with the connections it explores. Researchers found that songs with more common “global melodic contours” (overall melodic shapes common in Western pop music). For example, one of the most common contour patterns is heard in “Twinkle, Twinkle Little Star,” where the first phrase rises in pitch and the second falls. Numerous other nursery tunes follow the same pattern, making them easy for young children to remember, according to the authors. The opening riff of “Moves Like Jagger” by Maroon 5, one of the top named earworm tunes in the study, also follows this common contour pattern of rising then falling in pitch.
The other crucial ingredient in the “ear worm formula” is an unusual interval structure in the song (i.e. unexpected leaps or more repeated notes) that separates it from expectations of a usual pop song. The study offers the instrumental interlude of The Knack‘s “My Sharona” and Glenn Miller‘s “In The Mood” as examples of songs with this unusual interval structure.
There you have it, the reason behind that one song you just can’t get out of your head. Thanks, science!
[Cover photo via NPR // Article via ScienceDaily]