What Makes A Song Get Stuck In Your Head? Here’s What Research Shows

Earworm Science: Tempo, Melody And Repetition All Play A Part

Most of us have had this experience at one point or another: a chorus loops during an ordinary task, seemingly without permission. Researchers call this involuntary musical imagery, meaning music that plays in the mind without any effort to recall it. One detailed attempt to explain why some songs do this compared 100 frequently reported earworms with 100 similar songs that nobody had named. The so-called earworms tended to be faster, with a familiar overall shape and some less typical leaps between notes.

Why Do Some Melodies Loop So Easily?

Partly because of how often people hear them, and possibly because of how the melody is built.

A 2012 study in Psychology of Music, led by Goldsmiths music psychologist Victoria Williamson, sorted 604 written descriptions of how earworms began. Of those, 271 came from an online questionnaire and 333 were emails and text messages sent to the BBC radio station 6 Music. Hearing music, either recently or repeatedly, was the most common trigger. The other circumstances fell into three groups:

• Memory triggers: a word, person, sound or situation that brings a song to mind.
• Emotional states: such as a mood, stress or surprise.
• Low-attention moments: such as mind wandering or monotonous tasks.

Because people described their experiences after the fact, the study maps the situations in which earworms tend to start rather than proving what set off each one.

A 2017 study in Psychology of Aesthetics, Creativity, and the Arts drew on the same Goldsmiths online survey, using responses from 3,000 participants who were asked to name their most recent and most frequent earworms. The team limited the analysis to popular music, such as pop, rock, rap and R&B, so they could check each song against British chart records.

Songs that had reached higher chart positions, stayed on the charts longer or left the charts more recently were named as earworms more often. That sets a baseline: people need chances to hear a song before it can stick.

To see whether the music itself mattered, the researchers took 100 songs that at least three participants had named. They paired each one with a song nobody in the survey had mentioned, matching the pairs on chart peak, weeks on the charts, how recently the song had charted, artist and genre. That way, popularity alone could not explain any differences. Software then compared the songs on 83 measures, almost all of them describing the melody, plus tempo. Three features best separated the two groups:

Three features best separated the two groups:

• Tempo. Earworms tended to be faster, averaging about 124 beats per minute compared with about 116 for the matched songs.
• Overall shape. The pattern of rising and falling pitch across a phrase was more typical of pop melodies. In the examples the researchers highlighted, that shape was often an arch that climbs and comes back down.
• Slopes. The slopes between the points where an earworm’s melody changes direction were less typical. In the examples the researchers showed, those less typical slopes came from frequent or unusually large leaps between notes.

The authors suggest a common overall shape may make a tune easier to sing. This was observational research, so it cannot show that changing a chorus would create an earworm. The “non-earworm” songs were simply ones these participants did not name. Classical pieces, children’s songs and TV jingles were left out because they do not appear on the pop charts.

How Much Does Repetition Matter?

Repetition alone does not guarantee a song will stick, though. To test it directly, researchers at Queensland University of Technology in Australia ran an experiment, published in 2023 in the Quarterly Journal of Experimental Psychology. It involved 44 participants and four choruses by little-known artists. On the first day, each chorus was looped for two minutes at a time. Each participant heard one chorus once, one twice, one three times and one four times, with the songs rotated across participants.

The next day, participants tried to memorize short strings of digits and type them back in order. They did this both while each chorus played and in silence right afterward. The idea is that a song stuck in your head uses the same “inner voice” people use to rehearse numbers, so more mistakes in the silent period suggest the song was still playing in their minds.

Choruses heard more often on the first day tended to cause more interference, both during and after playback, but the effect depended on the song. In the silent period after playback, only the choruses heard four times pulled performance clearly below participants’ baseline. Ratings of familiarity and of the desire to sing along rose between sessions for every song, while enjoyment did not.

Repetition helps music enter memory. It does not make every chorus equally sticky.

Why Doesn’t The Same Song Stick For Everyone?

Because which songs get stuck depends heavily on the listener.

A review published in 2020 in Psychonomic Bulletin & Review by researchers at the University of Helsinki and Durham University pulled together 47 studies from 33 peer-reviewed papers published before May 1, 2019. Across those studies, the specific songs people reported showed little repetition from person to person, or even within the same person, unless researchers controlled what participants heard.

Earworms did share some traits. They were usually familiar, often liked, typically centered on the chorus and usually included lyrics. Beyond that, reports ranged across pop, classical, jazz, children’s songs, TV jingles and film music.

The authors described research on the musical features of earworms as still in its infancy. They also noted that the studies leaned heavily on Western, educated participants. The chart-song profile is therefore best read as a description of what tends to happen with Western popular music, not a universal rule.

What Does The Evidence Actually Support?

Earworms seem to come from a mix of exposure, the listener and the song itself.

When a chorus starts looping during an ordinary task, look first at what you have been hearing. Chart success, recency and repetition give a song more chances to settle into memory, and low-attention moments are one of the situations in which earworms tend to start. Melody may tip the balance. In the chart study, tempo and melodic shape helped separate earworms from similar hits even after popularity was taken into account. Still, repetition worked differently for different choruses, and the songs that stick vary widely from person to person. Your earworm probably says as much about your own listening history as about the song.