How the world’s catchiest Christmas song can destroy your life, according to science
There is a moment in the film adaptation of Nick Hornby’s book About A Boy, where the protagonist Will, played by Hugh Grant, wheels a trolley through a supermarket before exclaiming “Ah shit! It can’t be…” at the sound of an oncoming Christmas song on the PA.
Now, those who have watched the film would know that Grant’s dismay comes from a much more nuanced context, but in truth, I don’t care, because when mid-November rolls around, and my grocery shop is punctuated by the premature sound of Christmas music, I genuinely feel at one with his famously grumpy voice and his anti-festive grumblings.
It’s not that I’m an all-out Scrooge; there are plenty of things I love about Christmas, like the food, the community and the love, but Christmas music isn’t one of them. Unsurprisingly, as a person whose livelihood revolves around the enjoyment and analysis of it, I like to keep my music exclusive from the holidays, for I strongly believe that it isn’t as much of a product as Christmas aims to make it.
But drenched in bells and with a vocal hook custom-made to infiltrate your brain, the simple fact is, these songs are unavoidable in Western culture and ultimately ruin any of my plans to keep art and consumerism exclusive. Those are the two primary things that come to mind when I try to understand why these songs grate me so much: the bells, the hooks and the all-around repetitive nature of the songs seem most obvious, but maybe there is a science that can give my cynicism some credence.
Luckily, there is, as experts at SeatPick analysed the most popular festive songs, measuring repetition, shrillness and harmonic dullness as a means of irritation to provide a top ten list of festive earworms. It was determined that songs with the faster, simpler and ultimately more catchy melodies wiggled their way into your ear, to a point whereby mid-December, one in every five people are sick of Christmas songs.
So, using their three pillars of assessment, what song comes out on top? No, the answer is neither Michael Bublé, Mariah Carey or Band Aid, but instead José Feliciano with ‘Feliz Navidad’. According to SeatPick, “The song’s highly repetitive lyrics, even higher harmonic dullness and singable melody push it to the top of the rankings.
They discovered that the phrase ‘Feliz Navidad’ is repeated 21 separate times during the three-minute-long song, while the line ‘I wanna wish you a merry Christmas’ is repeated 18 times. This is a recipe for the perfect earworm.
Not only is it nice to have some data based evidence to help confirm my Christmas cynicism, but SeatPick were kind enough to offer some advice, as to how to combat the musical fatigue, and while playing other music was their first option, anyone who lives in the West will know that Christmas music is generally unavoidable, so mental exercises like sudoku and crosswords were advised, as well as chewing gum an activity also proposed as an accessible remedy.
According to research from Durham University, the rhythmic chewing motion interferes with ‘subvocalisation’, which is the inner speech mechanism your brain uses to mentally rehearse melodies, thus, the gum aisle will be my first stop during my next weekly shop.
