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"An earworm tends to be 10 seconds or less, usually just a fragment of a song, said Elizabeth Margulis, author of the book On Repeat: How Music Plays the Mind, on a recent episode of NPR’s Science Friday. Margulis also noted that the people who compose music for ads and TV are well aware of this and exploit it to their benefit. ..."
"Certain tunes are more than just appealing—they seem to get “stuck” in our minds. Song fragments that we can’t stop humming are called “earworms.” Musical psychologist Elizabeth Margulis describes what might cause these tenacious tunes and why repetition in music is so catchy."
"When I tell someone what I do, they often devote a lot of energy to explaining that they don’t know anything about music. “Music!” they’ll say, “I don’t know anything about music!” Yet these same people, so eager to disavow any expertise, might listen to music several hours a day. They might sing in their car, tap the steering wheel in sync with the beat, and be moved to tears by a song. These experiences rely on a remarkable array of highly sophisticated cognitive processes. The more I study the perceptual mechanisms underlying music listening, the more convinced I am that the vast majority of us, despite our protests, know an incredible amount about music. ..."
You probably wouldn't want to listen to a person speaking the same thing over and over and over. So why would you want to listen to the same song again and again? Yet research has found that generally the more that people hear a song, the more they like it -- unless, of course, they listen so much that they end up liking it even less than when they started.
This topic is just one that's covered by Elizabeth Margulis, Director of the Music Cognition Lab at the University of Arkansas in a new book, On Repeat: How Music Plays The Mind. In a conversation with Soundcheck host John Schaefer, Margulis explains about why repetition and music are so closely intertwined.
"A couple of years ago, music psychologist decided to make some alterations to the music of . Berio was one of the most famous classical composers of the 20th century, a man internationally recognized for the dramatic power of his compositions. But Margulis didn't worry much about disrupting Berio's finely crafted music. After loading his most famous piece into a computer editing program, she just randomly started cutting.
"I just went in and whenever there was a little pause on either side of something, I grabbed that out and then I'd stick it back in — truly without regard to aesthetic intent," she says. "I wasn't trying to craft anything compelling."
The idea behind this vandalism was simple: Margulis wanted to see if she could make people like Berio's music more by making it more repetitive. ..."
Elizabeth Hellmuth Margulis talks with Anne Strainchamps, host of WPR/PRI's nationally syndicated "To The Best of Our Knowledge," about "On Repeat: How Music Plays the Mind."
Elizabeth Margulis talks repetition in music with Madeleine Brand of Press Play on KCRW, NPR's flagship station for Southern California and Los Angeles.
"What is music? There’s no end to the parade of philosophers who have wondered about this, but most of us feel confident saying: ‘I know it when I hear it.’ Still, judgments of musicality are notoriously malleable. That new club tune, obnoxious at first, might become toe-tappingly likeable after a few hearings. Put the most music-apathetic individual in a household where someone is rehearsing for a contemporary music recital and they will leave whistling Ligeti. The simple act of repetition can serve as a quasi-magical agent of musicalisation. Instead of asking: ‘What is music?’ we might have an easier time asking: ‘What do we hear as music?’ And a remarkably large part of the answer appears to be: ‘I know it when I hear it again.’"
"This week on the Forum – we look at the power of expectation. How good are you at blind tasting? Could you tell if you sipped three different cups of coffee which was the best quality without seeing the price? And if you were given a pill to cure a headache – do you think it would help, regardless of whether it was real medicine or not? The Swedish neuroscientist Predrag Petrovic asks if a doctor’s expectations can affect the success of a patient’s treatment, the Indian neuro-economist Baba Shiv explains why consumers expect something to be better if they pay more, and the American musicologist Elizabeth Hellmuth Margulis on why our enjoyment of music is determined by what we’re expecting to hear.
The Forum is the BBC World Service's flagship discussion programme, bringing together prominent thinkers from different disciplines and different parts of the world to try and create stimulating discussion."
Discusses repetition in music with the BBC Radio 4 "Today" program
"Key to its success is its musical reiteration and the instructional nature of its lyrics, according to Dr Elizabeth Margulis, director of the Music Cognition Lab at the University Of Arkansas and author of On Repeat: How Music Plays the Mind. 'That’s a pretty repetitive song,” she says of Happy. “There is a catchy bit that expressly invites you to clap along. It is literally inviting you.' ...
She adds: 'The thing repetition really does is it captures the motor circuitry of the brain, so you have this sense the music is really pulling you along. It can make people feel really happy. There is something about having a song that is literally about being happy that is using this technique that makes people happy. It just feels good.' "
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."
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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.
