How To Get A Song Out Of Your Head
Because you can’t very well go around singing your toddler’s favorite Ms. Rachel bop all day.
It happens to the best of us. Your kid has been watching Ms. Rachel on a loop, and now you can’t stop singing “Walking at the Zoo.” Or maybe it was more subliminal than that — you don’t even remember when or where you heard the song that has now been stuck in your brain for hours... or days... maybe even weeks. Which begs the question: How do you get a song out of your head when it has fully taken up residence?
Germans coined the term for this experience more than 100 years ago: earworms, or öhrwurm. Psychologists and scientists have studied it often since, sometimes referring to earworms as “involuntary musical imagery” (INMI), “stuck tune syndrome,” “musical imagery repetition,” or just “sticky music.” But the unsettling vision of a creepy crawler wriggling its way into people’s brains was hard to shake, leading to the word earworm taking root in the collective consciousness.
There's no one genre that makes up the earworm market, either. Everything from the hip-hop song on the radio to the easy songs you sing with your kids could be an earworm. Even songs you sing to your infant or songs your littlest kids learned in preschool could be earworms. That’s a lot of opportunity to end up with a song as a squatter. Fortunately, there are a few things you can do to ensure you don’t end up relinquishing valuable brain real estate to something extra sticky, like “Bad Romance” by Lady Gaga or (da dum, da dum, da dum) “Baby Shark.”
What makes an earworm?
According to researchers, earworms have three things in common.
Most earworms have upbeat rhythms. Sure, you might occasionally find yourself humming “The Imperial March” while wandering through the grocery store, but most earworms often have a much snappier beat. “I worked on a study that we published a few years ago, back in 2017, where we looked at the features specifically of pop songs that get stuck in people’s heads. And we found that songs that are at a certain tempo range are sort of more likely to get stuck with people,” Dr. Kelly Jakubowski, a psychologist at the University of Durham in England, explained to Scientific American’s Science Quickly.
“Basically, we looked at pop songs that were really frequently named as earworms in a big survey compared to comparable pop songs that had never been named as earworms even once in this big survey. We found that earworm songs tended to be faster in tempo than the non-earworm songs. These tended to be around sort of 124 beats per minute as a sort of average tempo ... Something interesting about that tempo range is that it kind of aligns quite well with what we call the sort of spontaneous preferred tempo for humans.”
Earworms also have similar pitch patterns. Ever find yourself repeating one particular part of a song over and over again while you try to figure out why it sounds familiar? That's often done on purpose. Finally, earworm songs typically have large jumps between notes. In other words, they most likely offer a bit of vocal exercise since you might go from singing quite high to rather low.
What's the most common earworm?
The University of St. Andrews did their own look into earworms. They found all earworms have a similar equation:
Receptiveness + (predictability-surprise) + (melodic potency) + (rhythmic repetition x1.5) = earworm
After looking into that formula and doing some surveying, they created a list of the top 20 earworms ever. Perhaps unsurprisingly, Queen takes up several spots on the list. Freddie Mercury (Queen's lead singer) had quite the vocal range, so that lines up with both universities' similar earworm equations. Here are their "Top 10" earworm songs:
- Queen — “We Will Rock You”
- Pharrell Williams — “Happy”
- Queen — “We Are The Champions”
- The Proclaimers — “I’m Gonna Be (500 Miles)”
- The Village People — “YMCA”
- Queen — “Bohemian Rhapsody”
- Europe — “The Final Countdown”
- Bon Jovi — “Livin’ On A Prayer”
- James Pierpoint — “Jingle Bells”
- Baha Men — “Who Let The Dogs Out?”
So, how do you ditch an earworm?
Once a song is stuck in your head, it can be hard to get it out. While most people only struggle for a few minutes, others find that once a song is stuck in their head, it stays there until they're clicking their teeth to the beat and giving themselves a migraine.
According to one study, however, it's easier to get an earworm out of your head than you might think. They suggest these methods:
1. Chew gum. Jakubowski co-signs this one, with a caveat. “Chewing gum actually ties up what we call the sort of articulatory-motor planning system. So in order to mentally rehearse words or songs, we need to actually, essentially, sort of mentally sing them. So if you’re using your mouth, you can’t actually kind of fully mentally sing them,” she told Science Quickly. “So what they found is that when people chewed gum vigorously, they had fewer earworms of a song that they had heard earlier in the experiment. I think the ‘vigorously’ thing is key; I suppose if you kind of start chewing the gum to the beat of the music, that might not really help.”
2. Listen to or sing the whole song. We often replay the same earworm because only one part of it is memorable. If you listen to the whole song, you're likely to stop repeating just that one section.
3. Listen to something completely different sounding. Similar to the last tip, listening to something new and different requires you to stop obsessing over that one particularly catchy part of the song.
4. Ignore it or distract yourself. Umm... easier said than done, right?
