NEW DELHI : Much before songs going viral on the Internet, people got stuck to songs in their head from time to time ?
but why do certain tunes have such great appeal or what researchers have named the ‘the stick factor’? The first large-scale study, led by Dr Kelly Jakubowski at Durham University, UK, may have some answers to this musical stickiness. It has shown that songs that get stuck in your head – called earworms or involuntary musical imagery – are usually faster, with a fairly generic and easy-to-remember melody but with some unique intervals such as leaps or repetitions that set it apart from the “average pop song”.
Prime examples of earworms named in the study include Bad Romance by Lady Gaga, Don’t Stop Believing by Journey and perhaps not surprisingly Can’t Get You Out Of My Head by Kylie Minogue. It is often assumed that songs that get more radio time and have more recently featured in the charts are more likely to be reported as earworms.
The current study has also confirmed this idea by testing it scientifically for the first time. However, there has previously been limited evidence about what makes the actual song catchy regardless of popularity or how often people may have heard it.
“Our findings 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,” said lead author Dr Jakubowski from the Department of Music of the University.
This could help aspiring song-writers or advertisers write a jingle everyone will remember for days or months afterwards.
“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 by Lady Gaga.”
The study, published in the academic journal Psychology of Aesthetics, Creativity and the Arts, was conducted by researchers based at Durham University, Goldsmiths, University of London and the University of T bingen in Germany.
The current study found that the tunes most likely to get stuck in people’s heads were those with more common global melodic contours, meaning they have very typical overall melodic shapes commonly found in pop music.
An example of one of the most common contour patterns in Western music is that heard in Twinkle Twinkle Little Star where the first phrase rises in pitch and the second falls. Numerous other nursery rhymes follow the same pattern making it easy for young children to remember.
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. In addition to a common melodic shape, the other crucial ingredient in the earworm formula is an unusual interval structure in the song such as some unexpected leaps or more repeated notes than you would expect to hear in the “average pop song”.
The instrumental riff of My Sharona by the Knack and In The Mood by Glen Miller both have this unusual interval structure. Ninety per cent of us get a song stuck in our heads playing on an endless loop at least once a week. It normally happens at times when the brain is not doing much such as in the shower, whilst walking or doing chores. (AGENCIES)
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