How songs get stuck in your head, according to science
The catchiness of any song tends to be both a blessing and a curse for every artist. Even though it might be great to have a song stick in the listener’s mind as they go about their day, there’s a fine line between having a catchy song and creating an earworm that will annoy fans. Although many songs can claim to infiltrate the mind without fail, there is usually a specific science behind getting the perfect melody together.
Then again, most songs stuck in someone’s head usually go as far back as infancy. Even though no one can remember what they had for breakfast on the day they turned two years old, for instance, it’s easy to remember the nursery rhymes sung to you around this time, usually eliciting memories of being younger based on the sound of the tune.
Most nursery rhymes tend to follow the same principles as well. Since these tunes are meant to be simple by nature, many people can hear those melodies long after they have stopped singing them. Although music may be a part of everyday life, the art of songs getting stuck in your head tends to have more to do with musical memories than the song’s construction.
In a study conducted at Harvard University, Colleen Walsh observed the mechanics of what constituted a catchy song. Even though many artists tend just to follow their muse when it comes to writing a song, writing a simple melody is usually critical to making a song memorable from the first moment you hear it.
When talking about the brain’s function when listening to these songs, Walsh observed, “There are certain musical characteristics that make songs more likely to become earworms, such as if the piece is repetitive, if there is a longer duration of certain notes, if intervals between the notes are smaller”.
Even though everyone might have a different musical taste, this construction keeps the melody spinning around in one’s head. Although someone might claim to listen to only progressive rock music, it would still be more likely for an earworm like ‘Baby Shark’ to get stuck in their head than any Pink Floyd epic would.
The catchiness of a song doesn’t always have to come down to how it sounds. Walsh also details how the emotional connection to a song might take up space in one’s mind, retroactively putting memories of a meaningful time in one’s life inside the song’s melodic framework.
While the loop might be considered annoying, Walsh would say that the power of an earworm may also be slightly beneficial to one’s memory, explaining, “The phonological loop has been implicated — the process of holding something in your mind, like a mental scratchpad, for a certain number of seconds. So there are networks in the brain that support these functions of music — and memory, and attention, and keeping something in your head, and working memory”. Any earworm might be annoying to deal with, but whenever that song runs through your head, it’s playing back those musical memories from ages past.
