Th e advent of recording technology brought a precise, concrete kind of repeti-tion into the objective soundscape that shadowed the involuntary, imagined kind of repetition that characterizes earworms. Th is new similarity between the organization of sound in the real world and its internal, imagined occurrence can contribute to a sense of extended subjectivity, as if previously internal habits of auditory imagery have been pulled into shared, external, three-dimensional reality. While this sense of pulling what seemed subjective and individual into sounding, shared reality can seem pleasant and expansive, it also introduces the possibility of complicated feedback and interrelations. On the one hand, tech-nologically engendered repetition can seem ecstatic and expansive—but on the other hand, the mechanical basis of this experience might come to seem danger-ous or suspicidanger-ously consuming. Repetitiveness exposes the razor edge between internal and external, human and mechanical, private and public in a way that can either be interpreted as sublime or degenerate.
Are earworms really as pervasive as this account claims? Liikkanen’s (2008) study suggests that more than 90 percent of people experience involuntary music imagery at least once a week, and more than 25 percent of them experience it several times a day. Bailes (2007) used a diff erent methodology, contacting par-ticipants at random intervals over a week-long period and asking them to report
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their experience of musical imagery at the moment they received the request.
Th e prevalence rate varied widely among participants, but was still surprisingly high, with the participant who experienced the least frequent imagery reporting it on 12 percent of the sampled occasions, and the participant who experienced the most reporting it on 53 percent of them. Between ten percent and half of randomly selected moments throughout the day, in other words, were moments when people were experiencing musical imagery.
Th e highest incidence of musical imagery occurred during “time fi ller” activi-ties such as waiting in line, and more oft en in social contexts than when people were alone. Participants were generally aware of the imagined music, but it was not the focus of their att ention, and the experience typically wasn’t unpleasant.
Th e most vivid part of the imagery was the melody and the least vivid was the harmony, leading Bailes to favor the expression “tune on the brain” over “music on the brain” (p. 565).
An earworm most frequently consists of a looping tune—a looping sequence of notes rather than a looping progression of harmonies or a looping chain of timbres. Bailes points to the important role of the vocal system in musical imagery, and speculates that its lack of a capacity to simulate diff erent timbres physically may have constrained the ability to vividly imagine timbres during earworms. But research has shown that performers possess motor routines (such as fi ngering patt erns or breathing techniques) associated with the timbre of their instrument of expertise (see Margulis et al., 2009), raising the possibil-ity that imagined music for their own instrument might retain timbral vibrancy.
In response to an open-ended question about “how complete their imagery was,” most participants in Bailes’s study described “the image as a repeated frag-ment . . . very oft en the chorus of a song” (p. 562). Song choruses are not only the most frequent musical segment to show up in an earworm, they are also the musical segment most people can readily sing. What sounds people can vividly imagine are related to what sounds they can actually produce, a fact that high-lights the close relationship between musical imagery and the motor system.
Beaman and Williams (2010) carried out a diary study in which participants were asked to record earworm occurrences whenever and wherever they hap-pened. Sixty percent of the incidences that people reported consisted of small sections of the music—usually the chorus of a song, but occasionally some other fragment. All reported earworms came from music that had been previously familiar to the participants, suggesting that “only overlearned tunes are available to be ‘replayed’ as earworms” (p. 649). Th e authors speculate that repeated expo-sure is an important contributor to overlearning, but that “simple and repetitive tunes” might facilitate it over the short term. If you listen to a nonrepetitive song oft en enough, it might show up as an earworm, but tunes from repetitive music might emerge as earworms even before the song has been replayed very oft en.
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In an analysis of a large body of self-reported earworm descriptions from anony-mous callers to a BBC radio show, Williamson et al. (2012) identify recent and repeated exposure as the two most dominant earworm triggers; however, they note that factors beyond overlearning must also intervene, given that profes-sional musicians who spend hours practicing and re-practicing the same pieces appear not to experience an associatively extreme quantity of earworms.
Th e most in-depth account of the “loopiness” of involuntary musical imagery comes from Steven Brown’s detailed 2006 report of his own personal experi-ence with pervasive musical imagery. His name for the phenomenon, “perpet-ual music track,” highlights the way that audio technology has infl uenced our conceptualization of even imagined experiences of music. Since the music in fi lm scores frequently hovers over a scene without any sign of its actual physi-cal sources (e.g., we understand that the melody sweeping over the batt lefi eld scene didn’t come from violins on the front line), we are quite used to the idea of music permeating a scene without being physically present within it. Th is paral-lel makes it easy to think about imagined music as a kind of soundtrack; or, con-versely, it is possible that the ease of imagining music in this way made it more natural than it would otherwise have been for invisible soundtracks to become so common in cinema (cf. Cooke, 2008; Tan et al., 2013).
Th e perpetual music track described by Brown possesses at least one charac-teristic that distinguishes it from music you’d be likely to hear at the movies: it is composed largely of “short musical fragments that get looped repeatedly upon themselves” (p. 25). Th is loopiness is extensive; Brown reports that sometimes a short fragment will cycle ceaselessly in his mind for hours at a time. At other times, one fragment will loop for a while before inexplicably jumping to a new one, which itself begins to loop. “Th e boundaries of the looped fragments . . . are in general quite fuzzy. However, they correspond more or less to phrase bound-aries in the music, where the end point of the fragment is usually more stable than the starting point” (p. 30). By Brown’s estimate, fragments have a minimum length on the order of a few measures, and will loop either at that core level (say, the level of a half-phrase), or at a larger level that includes the core segment (say, the level of the phrase or section). Th e endpoints of the looping fragments are almost always the same; it is very rare for a fragment to cut off midway through.
Th e looping is oft en accompanied by fi nger movements (Brown is a pianist) that refl ect the contour of the melody, or by tapping or other rhythmic motions;
moreover, Brown notes that his breathing patt ern oft en synchronizes with the rhythm, proceeding as if he were singing the line himself (regardless of whether the imagined melody is actually sung or played on an instrument).
Brown expressly contrasts the loopiness of musical imagery with the “stream-iness” of verbal imagery. Inner speech doesn’t tend to jump around and loop repeatedly like musical imagery, a distinction that leads Brown to theorize that
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musical and verbal imagery “may have diff erent underlying natures” (p. 37). He att ributes this possible distinction to diff erences between the typical characteris-tics of music and speech, respectively. He cites Lomax to the eff ect that “music is much more formulaic, redundant and repetitive than language (Lomax, 1968)”
(p. 30) and that “song may be recognized and defi ned as more frequently redun-dant at more levels than any other kind of vocalizing (Lomax, 1968)” (p. 37).
Contrary to Brown, I make the case throughout this book that the repetitive-ness of musical imagery and actual music, rather than one being infl uenced by the other, are two manifestations of a general property of the cognitive musical capacity. Furthermore, modern recording technology has allowed composers and performers to play with this characteristic in a “knowing” way that is consis-tent with what Jonathon Kramer calls the “att itudes” of postmodernism (Kramer, 2002). Th ese att itudes include a kind of ironic distance that can emerge when cognitive predispositions (e.g., toward musical repetition) become available for playful use and consideration within the music itself.
A cognitive tendency so closely tied to motor systems, and so squarely removed from conceptual and rational kinds of thought, can naturally arouse suspicions; particularly when its repetitive structures so powerfully evoke sys-tems of mass production and a threatening mechanization (as explored in Fink, 2005 and Auner, 2003). Auner raises the example of the last utt erance of the dying HAL in 2001: A Space Odyssey , observing that its repetitiveness ( I can feel it. I can feel it. I can feel it.) encapsulates the horror of a kind of erasure of the human (p. 112). He quotes W. G. Sebald’s description of a brand of physi-cal disgust that can arise in response to inadvertent repetition in behavior or conversation—a sensation that is likely familiar to many. I recall one occasion when I was collecting data for a project, ushering participant aft er participant into a soundproof booth in a room where other researchers were working at vari-ous workstations. As I repeated the same instructions to each participant, and answered the same questions that tended to arise mid-experiment with the same language while my colleagues worked away in silence at their computers, I found myself almost irresistibly drawn to slight variations in the order or wording of my statements, disturbed by something inhuman and sinister in the experience of hearing the same words coming out of my mouth again and again. Th e same sort of squeamish feeling can arise when a person retells a story you’ve already heard, especially if the retelling includes verbatim locutions. Part of this discom-fort is att ributable to the fact that verbatim repetitions violate Gricean conver-sational maxims (see Grice, 1991) to reduce redundancy and remain maximally relevant, making the speaker seem boorish or improperly socialized. But part of it is att ributable to discomfort at the idea that thoughts are not our own, sponta-neous, soul-engendered entities, but rather products of some invisible, subcon-scious script: it’s a fear about automaticity and loss of control.
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While verbal repetition, especially verbatim verbal repetition, can raise these sorts of fears, the execution of motor scripts oft en fails to trouble us in the slight-est. I’m not at all worried that I use the same movements every time I brush my teeth, or that I move about the kitchen every morning in precisely the same sequence assembling a cup of coff ee, using the same gestures, and following an identical series of steps. In fact, it is only when these routines are interrupted that I am even aware of them: if the mug is not on the shelf as expected, or the tooth-brush fell on the fl oor. Th e repetitiveness of imagined and real musical stimuli have more in common, I would argue, with the inconspicuous repetitiveness of these routines than with the highly marked form of repetitiveness that can occa-sionally occur in language. Even when the linguistic repetition is goal-directed and necessary (as in the repeated instructions to experiment participants)—not diff erent in function from the kind of repetition that occurs in the case of tooth brushing or medicine preparing—it’s salient and unsett ling.