News
Adapted from Chapter 4 of Elizabeth Hellmuth Margulis' On Repeat: How Music Plays the Mind.
"Few people are spared the occasional experience of being gripped by the obstinate unfolding of an imagined line of music. Although the sound might not exist at the present moment in the real world, or be audible to anyone else, it can seem compellingly, maddeningly real. An episode of this sort often seems more like the reliving of a tune than the simple remembering of it."
Read More
How much repetition is too much repetition? How high would the number of plays of your favorite track on iTunes have to climb before you found it embarrassing? How many times could a song repeat the chorus before you stopped singing along and starting eyeing the radio suspiciously? And why does musical repetition often lead to bliss instead of exhaustion?
Music is repetitive, but just how repetitive remains a somewhat murky question. Repetition is found in the music itself, but also in your listening behavior. Your favorite track might feature a chorus that repeats several times, but you might also choose to play and replay this already repetitive track ad nauseam. David Huron estimates that more than 90% of the music people hear is music they’ve heard before. Victor Zuckerkandl explains...
by Neal Augenstein
WASHINGTON - Warning: this story contains songs you can't get out of your head.
Earworms - derived from the German Ohr (ear)+Wurm (worm) are songs that somehow crawl into your brain, where they are replayed ad nauseum.
"For many people, earworms are pretty annoying," says Elizabeth Hellmuth Margulis, associate professor and Director of the Music Cognition Lab at University of Arkansas, and author of On Repeat: How Music Plays the Mind.
Margulis says a recent study shows more than 90 percent of participants reported being seized by an earworm in the past week, and a quarter of those people said they had earworms several times a day.
The question is, "Why?"
"We don't really have control over what gets stuck in there," says Margulis. "It might be something we love, it might be something really annoying."
"Cynthia Schuster talks to Elizabeth Hellmuth Margulis about the annoyance of “ear worms,” those repeating snippets of songs that we can’t seem to get out of our heads."
On Repeat: How Music Plays the Mind: Elizabeth Hellmuth Margulis
Exploring the integral role of repetition and "hooks" in music and language.
“The literature in music cognition tends to claim that between 1/3 and 1/2 of people experience chills in response to music,” says Lisa Margulis, Associate Professor and Director of the Music Cognition Lab at the University of Arkansas. She says certain kinds of people are more likely to get them: performing musicians (a whopping 90 percent!), women, and people who rank low on the “sensation seeking” dimension of personality. “They don’t need a roller coaster to blow their mind,” Margulis says. “A few measures of Mahler is enough.” Full Article >
