Response: "What Lady Gaga’s ‘Bad Romance’ and Other Earworm Songs Have in Common"

The New York Times article with the above title was published at the beginning of November and interestingly related psychology to L ady Gaga's song Bad Romance as well as other "earworm songs".

The article's author, Joanna Klein cited music psychologist (which I was not aware was an actual thing) at Durham University, Kelly Jakubowski. Jakubowski recently published a study about why certain songs seem to "wiggle their way into people's heads and stay there", also known as an "earworm". In their study ,they compiled a list of different earworms and looked for patterns pertaining to the structure of the melodies. They then compared their list of songs to other songs by similar artists and chart rankings but were not listed as "earworms". An example of this is Lady Gaga's "Just Dance" single.

Jakubowski and her colleagues found that earworm songs tended to have a faster tempo and repetitive melody that was of a simple structure. They also had "surprising, unusual intervals" in their structure such as within the chorus.

I found this theory and subsequent study extremely fascinating as I never would have thought that there would be a certain structure to songs that were considered "earworms". Despite the ideas presented, the study has some flaws in that they do not specify how a song may be classified as an "earworm" and a song that may be an earworm for one person may not necessarily apply to another person. However these details of classifying an earworm could probably be found through further research into Jakubowski's original study.

Even more interesting than the original theory of why certain songs are earworms is the way of how we apply this theory to the real world. According to Jakubowski, "earworms could be remnants of how we learned before written language, when information was more often passed through song." This is due to how we as humans incorporate our different senses to understand music/ We can then use these different pathways to later retrieve the songs from our memory. Therefore this also provides more insight into understanding memory which is another topic we have learnt within our IB Psychology course.

The full article can be read here: http://www.nytimes.com/2016/11/04/science/earworms-lady-gaga-bad-romance.html?_r=0