Anyways, I switched my topic from the more serious subject on music therapy and what goes on in your brain when you hear music, to the topic of songs that get stuck in your head. I did some research and came up with this:
Everyone
knows what it’s like to have a song stuck in their heads. It’s a fact of life that certain tunes stick
with us. I have never questioned it much,
until one morning, on my way to my 9:25 class, I realized that I was looping
part of the LMFAO song “Shots” in my head.
It would stay there all day.
I discovered that there is a name for
this phenomenon. A song stuck in your
head has the unsavory title of “earworm”.
The only harm this parasite can cause you is annoyance, unless your
midterms have already driven you insane…
…or you’re a Nazi soldier in Henry
Kuttner’s 1943 short story. “Nothing But
Gingerbread Left” is about a song designed to have a “perfect semantic formula”
so that it would be unforgettable.
Written by a University professor, the song is in German, and is about a
starving family whose only food is gingerbread. When the song is broadcast
across occupied Europe it has a devastating effect on the German forces. Through a series of stream-of-consciousness
vignettes, Kuttner shows how the song works its way into the thoughts of the
soldiers and takes control.
Fourteen years later, another sci-fi
short story centered on the earworm phenomenon.
Arthur C. Clarke wrote about a scientist who created “The Ultimate
Melody” that was in sync with the brain’s electrical rhythms. After listening to his own piece, the
scientist became catatonic and never recovered.
Earworms, however, are not
exclusively the realm of science fiction, Mark Twain even wrote about happening
across a jingle (which, before the advent of television, was apparently printed
like a little poem in the newspapers) that completely consumed him for a few
days until he showed it to a friend and was freed from its influence. His friend then, became obsessed, and had to
‘transfer’ it to another.
Not even SpongeBob SquarePants is
safe—in the seventh season, incidentally titled “Ear Worm” our porous hero gets
the song “Musical Doodle” stuck in his head.
It
would seem like mind controlling songs only exist in fiction, but in fact, we
hear them all the time. They’re specially
designed to crawl into our brains and never crawl out, living in there forever
repeating “Don’t you want a, want a
Fanta?” until we crack and go buy the damn thing. Companies are just dying to get their brand
names and products into your head—what could be better than having a world full
of consumers whose own brains incessantly pester them with your product? Nothing—that is, if you like having money.
For a jingle to be effective, and
take a hold in your mind, it has to have several simple features. It must be short so you can actually remember
it, and also repetitive. And a good
earworm also has to have a pleasant yet simple melody. If the tune is written well, it will create
the “Shots” effect, where you start humming it on a Thursday morning and it
never stops.
So, in order to spare your wallet,
and also possibly your sanity, I asked the internet how to eliminate the
auditory parasites. Some of the less
ridiculous answers I found include:
-
Sing or play (on an instrument) another
song
-
Listen to the earworm song
-
Listen to music other than the earworm
song
If
none of those tips work, feel free to try some of the weirder ones such as
-
Try to ‘infect’ a friend
-
Imagine the earworm as a real creature, have it crawl out of your head,
and then step on it
And
if that doesn’t work, you can always go try to find what Henry Kuttner’s
anti-Nazi gingerbread song sounded like.
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