New Year, New Earworms
By Kathleen Kuo
Have you ever had a song stuck in your head? I, and many of you I am sure, have experienced this phenomenon in varying degrees; some mornings I wake up with a fragment of a song that might linger with me throughout the day before eventually fading. And then there are other instances where a song might play on loop for days and days, attempts to banish it notwithstanding.
In the music psychology community, this experience of “sticky music” is most commonly known as an earworm, or involuntary musical imagery. As an undergraduate student, I became enamored with studying how and why music affects our emotions and memories after reading the late Oliver Sacks’s book Musicophilia, in which earworms make an appearance. During the summer after my sophomore year of college, I shadowed a music psychology lab led by Dr. Lauren Stewart, where I went primarily to learn more about congenital amusia, but one of the projects I worked on also involved a collaboration with BBC Radio 6 Music where listeners called in with their earworms (this research was expanded upon by Dr. Vicky Williamson, who I also had the pleasure of working with that summer). Ever since then, I have held a particularly fond spot in my heart for earworms, as I wonder what invisible soundtrack plays in the heads of those around me as we go about our day.
I am not a superstitious person, but this past Sunday, January 24, I woke up with an earworm in my head. Sunday also happened to be the first day of the Lunar New Year (for many but not all Asian countries), and so I hope to take it as a good sign that the song that ushered in my Year of the Rabbit was Calendar Girl by Stars - a song that brought me tranquility and healing during difficult times in the past. When my parents called me on Saturday (their Sunday in Taiwan), my father wished me a year of peace and calmness after a tumultuous Year of the Tiger. I am not sure if this call with my parents is the reason why “Calendar Girl” became my first earworm of the new year, but it has been playing in my head every day since.
What are your perennial earworms? Are there any new ones that you have discovered recently? Share them with us. We would love to learn more about the songs that keep you company throughout the day.
Kathleen in the summer of 2009, taking part in an EEG study of piano performance.
Blogger photo courtesy of Kathleen Kuo.
Kathleen Kuo is a Program Manager with Nevada Humanities.