Beech Tree News Network

The Doors had them in spades.  America (the group, not the country) had plenty.  Lynyrd Skynyrd had them as well.  They and more had those unmistakable hooks where you just knew what the song was as soon as that riff was played.  “Horse With No Name” by America, “Touch Me”, “Light My Fire” and so many songs by The Doors are instantly memorable because of a single riff, “Mary Jane’s Last Dance” by Tom Petty and the Heartbreakers (among others by Tom & Co.), CCR and countless more that you instantly recognize as soon as that first chord is struck.  Why is that?

Every artist looks for something that they think is going to stick with the audience.  It might take a few attempts.  For instance, a writer uses the backspace button on their computer a lot.  Once you finally hit on something, be you an author, musician or whatever, there’s a hook in your line of work as well. 

Let’s get back to music, though.  A catchy hook can equal a big hit.  Why does a catchy hook stick in your brain? Repetition could certainly be the answer.  The scientific answer is a term called an earworm.  This tends to be a fragment of a song that gets stuck in your head.  Starship’s “We Built This City” and “Who Let The Dogs Out” by Baha Men are just a couple of tunes known to spawn earworms.  What I was speaking of in my introduction paragraph with the Doors, America and Skynyrd, they had the earworm market cornered.  I bet if anyone mentioned that term back in the ‘70’s, you’d hear a lot of “ear what”?

A professor from Switzerland’s Lucerne University of Applied Sciences and Arts as well as a fellow from the University of Sheffield, analyzed more than 50 different musical features and found that earworm songs tend to have notes with longer durations but smaller pitch intervals.  While almost everyone gets earworms at some point, Williamson’s research has found that people with neuroticism and non-clinical levels of obsessive compulsion experience them more often, and for longer periods of time. “These people tend to have more repeated thought processes in general, so it’s perhaps not a huge surprise that these are reflected in their experiences of mental music as well,” she says. (www.sciencefriday.com) 

You might want to be careful telling people you have worms, though.  They might keep their distance.