Ever wonder why that musical earworm keeps going on and on in your brain? And are My Pop Choir members more likely than other people to experience them?
“These relentless tunes play in a loop in up to 98% of people in the western world,” according to the Harvard Health blog. “In order to get stuck in your head, earworms rely on brain networks that are involved in perception, emotion, memory, and spontaneous thought.”
Kristine Fitzpatrick (Hamilton choir manager) agrees that memories and emotion play a part in ear worms. “I find I often hear bits of a song that take me right back to a moment in time. In fact, I’ve got one [earworm] right now. On the weekend we were enjoying some time outside on our patio, with the radio on, when ‘I Want It That Way’ by the Backstreet Boys came on. Anytime I hear this song I’m transported back to summer 1999.”
“Backstreet was not on my playlist,” she continues, “but I was the supervisor of a team of teenagers and this song was their jam. All week now snippets of it keep popping into my head.”
According to Harvard Health: “For two-thirds of people they are neutral to positive, but the remaining third find it disturbing or annoying when these songs wriggle their way into the brain’s memory centres and set up home, threatening to disrupt their inner peace.”
Bettina Goodwin, Oakville and Burlington Choir Manager, have mixed feelings. “Usually, I don’t find it annoying because I love to sing, but sometimes it’s a song I don’t like. You know those songs that you hate but you can’t get them out of your head? That’s the only time it annoys me.”
“It’s not always a song that I love,” agrees Susan McAlpine (Virtual Choir). “So how do I get rid of it and move on?”
Cures for earworms are as varied as the tunes that feature in them.
Suggestions include chewing gum or any repetitive task such as brushing your teeth. Some particular songs seem to work to break the endless pattern. “Someone once told me that if you start singing O Canada it will take you out of that loop,” says Bettina, “It did kind of work!”
As many earworms consist only of fragments, you can try singing the entire song. That is if you recognize it. Perhaps the worst type of earworm is the phrase that repeats itself, but you just can’t remember the song it comes from. Even if you are not a fan of The Big Bang Theory, you will recognize the frustration felt by the super-smart Sheldon Cooper as he tries various approaches to get to the source of his earworm:
Perhaps surprisingly, Hamilton choir director Jenn Kee, actually finds earworms useful at times. “When I am working hard preparing a show, I am immersed in the music I am working on. Some of it can get stuck in my head but that’s fabulous – I don’t have to turn it on. Of course, it can be counter-productive when it’s the same line over and over again!”
Are my Pop Choir members more likely to have earworms? Jenn would like to think so.
“I would hope that MPC members will be more susceptible as we practice for The Big Sing. You are immersing yourself in the music so much that it just becomes an obsession. I think that when you are constantly reviewing something you are more susceptible. When you are so focused on a small amount of music or just a handful of songs, they become stuck in your head.”
Susan agrees: “Almost every choir session there was one song that would lodge itself in my brain and would go through my head for a few days afterwards. Usually, it is something I really liked and I really like ‘Beautiful City.’ It was an earworm for a very long time!”
You might think that earworms are a modern phenomenon. With all the devices available to us for streaming music continually, it makes sense to think the post-modern world “invented” earworms too. But in 1876, Mark Twain wrote “A Literary Nightmare,” a short story about an earworm that took over an entire town. Makes you wonder what was playing in Shakespeare’s head while he was trying to focus on Hamlet.
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