An interview with Indre Viskontas at the annual meeting of the Society for Music Perception and Cognition in Nashville. Listen here >
Today: Earworm?
It's almost "song of the summer" time. Whether that belongs to Taylor Swift ("Style"), Britney Spears ("Pretty Girls") or someone else, one thing's clear, you won't be able to avoid it. It will get relentlessly stuck in your head.
Fox 5 New York City
Interview with Stacey Delikat on the 10 o'clock news, Fox 5, NYC
"What does the reminiscence bump have to do with music? We hit the streets of New York to find out what songs have stuck with you."
Medium: Forever Fifteen
When we are heartbroken, why do we turn to the music we loved as teens?
TED Ed: Earworms
Have you ever been waiting in line at the grocery store, innocently perusing the magazine rack, when a song pops into your head? Not the whole song, but a fragment of it that plays and replays until you find yourself unloading the vegetables in time to the beat? Elizabeth Hellmuth Margulis explores earworms — a cognitive phenomenon that plagues over 90% of people at least once a week.
WNYC's Studio 360: Backup Singers Bring the Hits
Futureproof on Newstalk: It's all about that beat
Futureproof, the science program on the Irish national radio station Newstalk, explores music and repetition.
Lifehacker: Listen to a Single Song on Repeat
If you listen to music while working, consider shortening your playlist to just one or a few songs. It might boost your concentration and focus.
Baltimore Symphony Orchestra: The Power of Musical Repetition
If you listen to music, you instinctively know that a song sounds different the tenth time you hear it from the first. Repetition is an often overlooked yet powerful part of the way we process music
The Irish Times: Your dad was right all along: pop music does all sound the same
MIC.COM: Turns Out People Who Claim They Have "Perfect Pitch" Are Not So Special After All
Psychological research shows that perfect pitch may not be the game-changing musical ability we've long thought it was.
Buzzfeed: 13 Things You Probably Didn't Know About Listening to Music
There’s a reason you can’t get that one song out of your head.
Aeon Magazine: The Music in You
Twenty years ago, a pair of psychologists hooked up a shoe to a computer. They were trying to teach it to tap in time with a national anthem. However, the job was proving much tougher than anticipated. Just moving to beat-dominated music, they found, required a grasp of tonal organisation and musical structure that seemed beyond the reach of an ordinary person without special training. But how could that be? Any partygoer can fake a smile, reach for a cheese cube and tap her heel to an unfamiliar song without so much as a thought. Yet when the guy she’s been chatting with tells her that he’s a musician, she might reply: ‘Music? I don’t know anything about that.’
Boston Globe: Earworms
"Here’s what we do know: About 90 percent of people report having a song stuck in their head at least once a week — admittedly not all Swift-generated — according to Elizabeth Hellmuth Margulis, the author of “On Repeat: How Music Plays the Mind,” and director of the Music Cognition Lab at the University of Arkansas....
I nodded as Swift serenaded me against my will. It’s like I got this music in my mind..."
Cafe.com: Humanity is Primed to Binge Listen
Article by Sophie Brickman:
"Drawing on neuroscience, music theory, and cognitive psychology, Margulis delves into why we are attracted to repetition in music, whether that be a repeated phrase within a piece, the repeated listening of a song or, at a macro level, the repeated listening of a full album. I read the entire book in one sitting, identifying aspects of my behavior in her analysis—everything from the fact that behavioral repetition, like hitting that play button over and over, can cause us to “become connected to the sound in a way that feels almost physical” (hello, conducting the drum clash in the middle of the street, or walking in rhythm to the beat) to having what the Germans call an Ohrwurm, or ear worm, a phrase of music that burrows into your head and inches around and around."
Brain Pickings: How Repetition Enchants the Brain
"In On Repeat, a fine addition to these essential books on the psychology of music, Margulis goes on to explore how advances in cognitive science have radically changed our understanding of just why repetition is so psychoemotionally enticing..."
Ted Ed: Why We Love Repetition in Music
"How many times does the chorus repeat in your favorite song? How many times have you listened to that chorus? Repetition in music isn’t just a feature of Western pop songs, either; it’s a global phenomenon. Why? Elizabeth Hellmuth Margulis walks us through the basic principles of the ‘exposure effect,’ detailing how repetition invites us into music as active participants, rather than passive listeners." View lesson on TedEd >
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