Why do we get some songs stuck in our head?
2009-06-21
Here's something I'd love to dive deeper into:
Why do we get some songs stuck in our head?
The book “Made to Stick” analyzed it wonderfully for stories and words. But what about music?
There are some songs I haven't heard in 30 years, but I can still play them in my head on call. (example)
Yesterday afternoon I heard the song “Tonight” by Lykke Li, and this morning woke up still singing it. (Great repeating 1-bar hook with the highest note on the downbeat. Find the full album version with great orchestration.)
My old teacher Jack Perricone has some great lessons for songwriters on writing memorable melodies, but that doesn't get into why music sticks in our brain.
Books like Brain Rules analyze evolutionary reasons why our brains do the things they do. (“Brains in wild animals are 15%-30% larger than tame, domestic counterparts. The cold, hard world forced the wild animals into constant learning mode. It is the same with humans.”)
But why music?
Any ideas?
This bloke has a few things to say about it
http://brainwaves.corante.com/archives/2007/01/01/why_do_we_remember_pop_songs_neuroesthetics_wants_to_know.php
Brilliant! Thanks Michael! -- Derek
When I teach songwriting, I often tell students they should aim for an "ah ha" moment, when the listener will think, "I recognize that feeling, but I've never heard it said that way before." That often makes the listener like and remember the song.
I think It sticking in the head, however, comes from rhythm and a build in melody. It has evolved in us from chanting to like building, flowing melody lines.
A great question.
A couple of years ago I did read some reports of research explaining why the music we listen to as children and adolescents ESPECIALLY get stuck in our heads, and it has almost nothing to do with the quality or structure of the music itself and everything to do with how the exposure to music actually changes your brain while it's still developing--creates specific neural pathways that become permanent and forever "excitable" by that same music.
Later on, around age 25, our brain matter becomes more or less solidified, so music heard after that age can never really stick as deeply.
I'll do some Googling and see if I can dig up the original article I found that described the process.
I really have no clue...
I will say that since hearing Santigold's "Unstoppable" on your blog at http://sivers.org/dance-lessons, it got stuck in my head so I finally had to get it from iTunes.
Now it's my new theme song ;-)
Yeah there's got to be something about your emotional involvement when listening. When watching that YouTube video, we were completely engaged, paying close attention. Same as in the key scene of a movie. Add a very (VERY) repeated hook to that, and voilá! -- Derek
I am curious about @Sandy's comment about "around age 25, our brain matter becomes more or less solidified,".
I am not sure that I agree, surely it depends on how you keep your brain busy. If you are still keeping the synapses active the neural linkages will still be generating and forming pathways that will eventually become permanent.
Not saying @Sandy is wrong, just in my experience I have Feist's 1234 on instant recall, and it feels awfully permanent to me.
Looking forward to the article and references to the papers.
That book Brain Rules talks about this. Saying that it doesn't have to happen that way, but it's more linked to change in lifestyle. Going from learning to monotonous repetition (sticking with what you know). Going from an active lifestyle to a sedentary one. Etc. -- Derek
Oliver Sacks calls the phenomenon "Brainworms" in his book "Musicophilia".
-- Derek
It's usually the one-hit wonders that get stuck in my head.
Thanks for the book recommendation. Just bought it. I'll report back.
Great song to get stuck in your head, Derek.
There are times when I think a song gets stuck in your head b/c there's a lyrical message you're supposed to "get" or maybe
act on. Melody is like fragrance...
a particular grassy field, someone's sweatshirt in an embrace, the Italian Feast in the town where I grew up--all of those smells I can remember at this moment in my mind.
So, whatever part of the brain makes that happen, may have the same pleasing affect with music.
I haven't read this book to know if the subject is covered in it, but I suspect that it is.
http://www.yourbrainonmusic.com/
Wow! Also sounds right up my alley. Thanks for the recommendation. -- Derek
I found this in a Salon review of Your Brain on Music.
"One more thing on the connection between memory and music bears mentioning, if only for the name: the 'earworm.' This word, from the German 'ohrwurm,' describes the annoying feeling of having a song stuck in your head. Alas, Levitin says relatively little research has been done on the phenomenon -- all we really know is that musicians and people with obsessive compulsive disorder are more prone to getting earworms, and that for most people it's small bits of songs, rather than entire songs, that we keep repeating. And if it seems more common that terrible songs get stuck in your head, that might be because bad songs -- and commercial jingles -- are the ones with the simplest phrases."
http://www.salon.com/books/review/2006/09/05/levitin/
It's all about waves and synchrony. I'd imagine certain melodies somehow manage to hit the 'natural frequency' of the makeup of your mind and keep echoing over and over in your neural chambers. The repetitions of the echos naturally cause the melody to stick.
I imagine it's the same thing when you can't forget the face of a lover, a tasteful dish or an idea you fall in love with.
About a year ago, when Jerry Reed died, I kept listening to, "Amos Moses," and would sing it and hum it and speak it constantly... like Peter Griffin in Family Guy obsessed with, "Surfin' Bird." At least I really like the song.
I think it's a little cocktail of simplicity, repetition, and semi-familiarity. The 'hook' that seems to always get me is one that seems to set up an expectation and then slightly subvert it with a little offbeat twist. Repetition seems to be key, for an example check the latest Green Day single. BTW love your blog, always great food for thought!
Derek-
Thanks for the post. I *LOVED* Made to Stick. ONe of the best little books Ive read in a long time.
In addition to Musicophilia, I'd recommend Music the Brain and Exctasy- I couldnt put it down:
http://www.amazon.com/Music-Brain-Ecstasy-Captures-Imagination/dp/038078209X/ref=pd_sim_b_2
The book doesnt really address why certain songs get stuck in our head- but it does talk about why we enjoy certain music.
Compley issue, this...
I think there are a lot of different approaches to that matter, be it musical, psychological or neurophysical.
My (rather simple) opinion about this is, that the likeliness for a song to "stick" to your brain is kinda counter-equivalent to the amount of conscious control at the moment your hear it.
(As musicians,) We all know that music in itself works on a very emotional level, and has an even greater impact when you do not think about it, or analyze it.
As a child it is rather unlikely for one to have the "filters" for any kind of input. That's why you remember everything so well, everything is original and works as a reference for any other experience you make later on.
This effect repeats when you're an adolescent, because your body is (partially) rebuilt and readjusted by hormones and stuff. Again, I think the emotional sensitivity and the lack of experience to handle your own emotions (not to say instability, rollercoaster style!) make it easy for songs to stick in specific situations, because they stand out as unique events (and we often do not remember them consciously!).
As an adult, I think it is harder to experience moments of outstanding emotional intensity, because you already have had heaps of experience, not to mention that your head is always busy and distracted.
And of course, not to forget the easiest way for making something stick: repetition.
I can state for myself having heard a lot of songs without ever coming them back in my mind--but in certain situations they strike back. Often just once, but funnily enough, in an iterative process, this often creates reference memories that make the song stick!
Whatever the reason might be, most often a certain song or melody has the power to evoke the emotions that you had when it happened to get stuck in your head.
And that's the exciting thing about being a musician, to have the ability to transform your thoughts and emotions of whatever kind to a "language" that can be understood by almost everybody, without saying a word.
So that's just what I think, I can't deliver any proof for that. ;o)
I started off as a pop musician, then got a degree in classical music composition, then spent a lot of time reading in cognitive science, so I hope my opinion might have some bearing:
SHORT VERSION:
Catchy songs have melody, lyric, rhythm or sound which has a acoustic structure to it which builds up tension and releases tension in a pleasing way. ALSO they are using some method of data compression to encode the melody, which means the brain can organically compress and uncompress it, making recall much easier.
THE LONG EXPLANATION:
I think there are many aspects which can make a song 'catchy'. Melody, Lyric timbre (the 'quality' of the sound), a rhythm or some particularly unusual harmony.
Melody: This is most often the thing which gets stuck in people heads. Even if the listener didn't like the music originally. My theory is that a catchy melody is 'catchy' when it does TWO things:
1) It contains notes and rhythm which convey a series of tension-and-releases which are pleasing to us cognitively.
There are various combinations of notes, for example, tritones, semitones which when played together, or near to one another in time (time is mushy in the brain), sound discordant. Discordant means 'stressful', for example, think of someone playing a 'wrong note' when playing the piano. In many countries, a train horn consists of a tritone, because this combination of notes is unsettling, appropriately!
But why are some note combinations unsettling? Let's look at the tritone. The is also called the 'augmented 4th' or 'diminished 5th', depending on it's musical context. You can play a tritone by playing the notes C and F sharp at the same time on a piano. Or alternatively sing the opening line to "The Simpsons" TV theme.
"The" and "Simp…" are a tritone, which is resolved upwards to a 'perfect fifth' on "…sons"
These two notes, when played together, are giving the brain conflicting sets of overtone series. The brain is trying to work out 'how many sounds am I hearing?', and it does this by taking the many frequencies in each note, and resolving/grouping them together so you hear a single note, or voice. There are many frequencies ('overtones') made by a musical instrument, or voice, or struck object which are all created at the same time — but we hear them as a single sound with a certain 'quality'. For example, a trumpet and a clarinet can play the exact same note, but it's easy to tell them apart. This is because of the overtone series, which your brain has decoded.
OK, sorry to get so technical on you, but you can think of 'discord' as combinations of notes which the brain has to struggle to understand, and 'concord' as pleasing combinations of notes which the brain can easily understand. All of this is driven by the physics of the overtone system.
Like any good film, a good melody has parts which are full of tension (discordant), and some parts which are relaxing(concordant). And it may alternate between them in seconds. In The Simpsons opening motiff, we hear a tritone which has a slight tension for a split second before it's resolved. End result is that we feel good! There was tension, but now it's gone! phew!
2) The second part is data compression. You can think of it like files on the internet which are 'compressed' when you download them, and 'uncompressed' by your computer when. My understanding is that the brain works in a similar way — compressing the data into something smaller if it can in order to make it easier to store. A melody which is a good match to the brains 'organic compression scheme' will compress and uncompress easier from your memory.
There are various melodic 'tricks' which allow you to distort melody into new shapes in organic ways. Pop writers often use them unconsciously, classical writers sometimes do it consciously.
But the end result is the same: they build structure into a melody so it's data (the sequence of notes and rhythms) is easily compressed in an organic way. For example, think of the song from the Sound of Music: Do-Re-Mi. ("Doe, a deer, a female deer…"
It's pretty much the same melodic 'shape' for the first 8 bars, but the melodic shape is shifted and contorted over the western major musical scale. The brain doesn't have to store each note, it can just store the first two bars, and then store the difference in the subsequent bars. It's the same approach used by a computer when it does .zip file compression — it looks for more abstract ways to describe the file's contents so it doesn't need to 'memorize' as much.
There are *many* other ways in which melodies can altered to create new things. I'll make a comparison which may help
Melody:Photoshop
===========
Repetition:Copy+Paste
Segmentation: Crop
Augmentation: Increase contrast
Diminution: decrease contrast
Ornamentation: Emboss
Invert: Color invert
…etc.
In essence the 'catchy' melody is an organic structure which is self-referencing, making it a lot easier to memorize. And it's worth memorizing because it has a cognitively pleasing 'story' of concordant sections and discordant sections. And if it's done well enough, maybe the brain can't help but 'unravel' the entire melody when a fragment of it is triggered.
The other factors, lyrics,rhythm, timbre, etc. have their own idiosyncratic ways of compression. For example, rhymes help you to remember lyrics by using redundant sounds at the end of each line:
I was so blue
then I met you,
I hope you too
love my hair-do.
The lyrical equivalent of concord and discord is in the interesting emotional story, phrases or pronunciations "ppppeople try, to put us ddddown, talkin' bout my generation."
Timbre and Rhythm also have their own perks which I don't have time to go into.
Obviously this is my opinion, and I'm in no way saying that we 'understand' how songs become catchy, not have a recipe for it. It's complex, subtly stuff. And also culturally sensitive.
But I believe it's not all subjective — Although my composition teacher never formalized it like I have above, he certainly was adamant that there is 'good music' and 'not-so-good-music', no matter what genre it is.
Hope that helps!
Keith
I think if the song was memorable to you, it would surely get stuck in you head no matter how old it is.
I'm so glad to see some great explanations on here, and also that people have directed you to the two most popular figures in American music cognition: Oliver Sacks and Daniel Levitan. Personally, I've found the blog of Henkjan Honig, a Dutch music cognition professor, quite helpful:
http://www.musiccognition.nl/blog/
He has done a number of posts on the earworm idea, as well as wondering whether or not beat induction is unique to humans or if other species can do it as well. I hope you enjoy it!
Best,
E
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Playing on the bandstand cured me of that. I had to learn to think of the intro to one song while playing the ending of another. Once you've learned to do that, "un-sticking" a pop song from your head is a piece of cake.
I frequently wake up with songs in my head that I hardly ever listen to. It's like my head has it's own radio station that keeps playing while I am asleep. I often have songs I don't even like in my head when I wake up. Interestingly enough this only happens during the week, when I wake up on the weekend it doesn't happen hardly at all.
Does anyone else have the Simpsons theme stuck in their head now? Or another song mentioned here?
I can never get through a comment thread about music without something getting stuck.
My favorite advice for getting a song unstuck from your head is to sing either:
a) the words of Amazing Grace to the tune of Gilligan's Island
OR
b) the words of Gilligan's Island to the tune of Amazing Grace
And.... zap.
I enjoyed Oliver Sach's book Misicophilia. He gives case histories, but as for an explanation for this phenomena, science isn't quite there yet. I find that the experiences have so many variables that it is difficult to identify the important ones in the brain.
When I get a song stuck I usually just enjoy it. If I am not enjoying it, I either try to sing the song to the end or try another song. The Gilligian's Island song is evil!! If I sang that one to rid myself of another, it would be a more severe problem-- that is one of the songs that get stuck in my head.
Usually though, if I can finish the song it goes away. For me it is kind of like a record skipping (yeah I know, there are people that don't know what a record is).
There is an article related to this at:
http://www.scientificamerican.com/article.cfm?id=why-music-moves-us
Try switching the words and tunes of Amazing Grace and House of the Rising Sun -- it might not get another song out of your head but it will reveal new dimensions of each song.
For myself, I just wonder why my mind always seems to need a songtrack running. Would I be thinking genius thoughts if I weren't silently humming?
It's your unconscious mind putting a sound to something it's working out. Any time a song pops into your head, chill for a moment, then think of the title, or an important part of the lyric. It will always have something to do with an important life function. I was a hypnotherapist for as long time. Your unconscious mind is a total gas. Dick Summer
In India, music is considered the connection between "God" and human, hence the live music played continuously without stop for , we were told in one temple, since the time Buddha walked the earth.
In Senegambia (Senegal/Gambia)the music we recognise as the Blues in this part of the world (Rhythms/melodies/construction) is the conduit for all the Oral history and wisdom of the Mandinga People, to give just 2 examples of the historical value/meaning of music. Neurologically, we seem as a species, perhaps, to have developed the ability to resonate on some spiritually deeper level with music. Otherwise, and this is a question that has long fascinated me, HOW could music make us cry? Why?
A simple guitar-piece of mine, used for years as a TV call-sign in Germany, has become over the years, to many many people, an instant time capsule taking them back to 30+yrs ago in their youth. Part of the same phenomena I think.
Wow. Reading these comments makes me realize how little I know about music and the brain.
I once heard Paul McCartney describe in simple terms what makes a hit song....and he has had a few.
He said that every song should have a part, usually the chorus, that is simple and instantly memorable and repeatable by the listener.
Same thing that you folks are saying I suppose...just in language that old farts like me can understand.
I'm relieved to see that I'm not the only one this happens to. I love music, both singing and listening to it, although, I'm not a good singer. I've memorized hundreds of songs during my life and my mind seems to be on "shuffle all" so any song tends to pop into my mind alot and then the singing it over and over again starts. Sometimes, I just wish I had a "Stop All" button to make it end.
@Keith Lang
Thank you! your comment was very informative to me. It gave me a possible answer as to why i often wake up with random songs i haven't heard in years stuck in my head.
Please don't worry about getting too technical, IMO what you said is right on the money as to why some songs are "catchy"
I have often referred to myself as a human jukebox because of this, as i can never give a reason why the particular song is in my head and will stick for days.
The melodies you describe have a natural tendency to get "stuck". After thinking about what you wrote and my morning song-lock i wonder if a dream i had brought me to a time where that particular melody was in context to the event i was dreaming about.
I rarely remember my dreams, though i have been keeping a dream journal lately to get in touch with my dreaming mind.
It is amazing how songs can take you to a particular time and situation no matter how much time has passed.
Then main part of your comment that struck home to me is that every time i can remember where i woke up with a random song stuck in my head, the song was a song i listened to before age 25. I dont wake up with a 6 month old song stuck in my head, it is always a song from my youth.
Very though provoking!
The books you have mentioned on this post are my favorites, there are a lot of wonderful thoughts/ideas on the subject, I learned a lot from them.
Kyle Seals and Keith Lang,
I have the fortune of having my own original "jukebox" show up in my head every now and then..... That is, my brain will create a melody with parse lyrics during sleep. It's happened for a long time and I just decided to investigate the method for putting them down to music since I don't play any. Just twenty minutes ago, for example, I woke up with: While you lay, there's a _ _ _ _ _ _. _ _ _ _ __ _ _ _ _ _ _. Let it fall, let it fall, let it fall, let it fall. I've heard musicians say this is how some songs come to them as well. Would you guys or anyone out there be able to tell me how to get these sounds in my head into music?
Thanks!