WASHINGTON — What makes an earworm? Science may have the answer.
Earworms — insanely catchy songs that get into your head and won’t leave, even if you don’t really like them — were the subject of a recent study led by Kelly Jakubowski, of the UK’s Durham University.
That study, published in the journal Psychology of Aesthetics, Creativity and the Arts, found a few things common to most earworms: They’re generally up-tempo songs with melodies that are easy to remember.
“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 [Lady Gaga’s] ‘Bad Romance,’” Jakubowski told CBS News. Indeed, Lady Gaga turned up three times in the top 10 earworms cited in the study.
The study said that earworms often have patterns in which the first melodic phrase rises and the second falls — think “Twinkle Twinkle Little Star” — or has a lot of repeated notes, such as “My Sharona,” by The Knack.
The study asked 3,000 people about their most common earworms, took the 100 most-cited songs and compared them to 100 songs that weren’t called earworms but had had similar chart success at similar times.
Jakubowski says that earworms are a product of “spontaneous cognition,” which she defines as “thinking thoughts unrelated to our present task.” She says that people spend about 40 percent of their time in such thought, and that if we understand how the process happens, it’s a building block to understanding how the brain works.
Still, she has practical advice for getting rid of earworms: Listen to a different song, or listen to the earworm song all the way through — often you’re just stuck on a piece of a song. A different study suggests you could just chew a piece of gum.
The 10 most commonly cited earworms in the study:
- “Bad Romance” by Lady Gaga
- “Can’t Get You Out Of My Head” by Kylie Minogue
- “Don’t Stop Believing” by Journey
- “Somebody That I Used To Know” by Gotye
- “Moves Like Jagger” by Maroon 5
- “California Gurls” by Katy Perry
- “Bohemian Rhapsody” by Queen
- “Alejandro” by Lady Gaga
- “Poker Face” by Lady Gaga
