Tis the season

Have you ever wondered why some songs keep getting stuck in your head? Do you sometimes struggle to fall asleep at night because that one line from that song you heard once keeps on repeating over and over again in your head? Don’t worry you’re not alone. This phenomenon is called earworms.

This is the season where earworms are most common. Everybody at some point in this season will hum jingle bells even if they weren’t listening to it in the recent past. This is because

earworms seem to come more often from songs which have fairly conventional melodic patterns together with something unusual – a key change, or unexpected leaps or repetitions. Just like the well-known negative effects of actually heard background music on concentration and task performance, it seems that earworms can even impair our concentration on other tasks – whether those are songs with lyrics which could interfere with memory or even purely instrumental sequences like the Star Wars theme.

according to ‘The Conversation’ writer Alexandra Lamont. 

Repetition is important for a song to become an earworm. Think back to all your favourite songs. How many times are the same phrases repeated or the same melodies repeated? A good example of this would be Taylor Swift’s recent song ‘Look What You Made Me Do’. Many people hated the song when it was first released. They thought it was simple and too repetitive. Yet 4 months later it’s still on Billboard’s top 100 songs list. That being said too much of a good thing makes it bad and that is the case for songs as well. If a song is repeated too many times people can get sick of it. Case in point Psy’s famous hit ‘Gangnam Style’. The song was a hit back in 2012 however, if you had to play it for anyone now they’d groan as it has been played many many times and people are sick of it.

Many Christmas songs are written in this matter hence they are extremely catchy. Another reason is that they are seasonal songs meaning that we’re only exposed to them for a short period of time every year. So once we get sick of them at the beginning of January we can just store them away until the next November (or October for the very eager few).

However, even though there are certain elements that create earworms each person reacts to earworms in a different way. For example, I may get earworms through melodies but you may get earworms through lyrics.