BBC World Service: The Forum

"This week on the Forum – we look at the power of expectation. How good are you at blind tasting? Could you tell if you sipped three different cups of coffee which was the best quality without seeing the price? And if you were given a pill to cure a headache – do you think it would help, regardless of whether it was real medicine or not? The Swedish neuroscientist Predrag Petrovic asks if a doctor’s expectations can affect the success of a patient’s treatment, the Indian neuro-economist Baba Shiv explains why consumers expect something to be better if they pay more, and the American musicologist Elizabeth Hellmuth Margulis on why our enjoyment of music is determined by what we’re expecting to hear.

The Forum is the BBC World Service's flagship discussion programme, bringing together prominent thinkers from different disciplines and different parts of the world to try and create stimulating discussion."

The Big Issue: Why Happy Grabbed the Nation

"Key to its success is its musical reiteration and the instructional nature of its lyrics, according to Dr Elizabeth Margulis, director of the Music Cognition Lab at the University Of Arkansas and author of On Repeat: How Music Plays the Mind. 'That’s a pretty repetitive song,” she says of Happy. “There is a catchy bit that expressly invites you to clap along. It is literally inviting you.' ...

She adds: 'The thing repetition really does is it captures the motor circuitry of the brain, so you have this sense the music is really pulling you along. It can make people feel really happy. There is something about having a song that is literally about being happy that is using this technique that makes people happy. It just feels good.' "

Oxford University Press Blog: Encore! Encore! Encore! Encore!

How much repetition is too much repetition? How high would the number of plays of your favorite track on iTunes have to climb before you found it embarrassing? How many times could a song repeat the chorus before you stopped singing along and starting eyeing the radio suspiciously? And why does musical repetition often lead to bliss instead of exhaustion?

Music is repetitive, but just how repetitive remains a somewhat murky question. Repetition is found in the music itself, but also in your listening behavior. Your favorite track might feature a chorus that repeats several times, but you might also choose to play and replay this already repetitive track ad nauseam. David Huron estimates that more than 90% of the music people hear is music they’ve heard before. Victor Zuckerkandl explains...

FULL ARTICLE >

WTOP (Washington, DC): How Earworms Crawl Into Your Head

by Neal Augenstein

WASHINGTON - Warning: this story contains songs you can't get out of your head.

Earworms - derived from the German Ohr (ear)+Wurm (worm) are songs that somehow crawl into your brain, where they are replayed ad nauseum.

"For many people, earworms are pretty annoying," says Elizabeth Hellmuth Margulis, associate professor and Director of the Music Cognition Lab at University of Arkansas, and author of On Repeat: How Music Plays the Mind.

Margulis says a recent study shows more than 90 percent of participants reported being seized by an earworm in the past week, and a quarter of those people said they had earworms several times a day.

The question is, "Why?"

"We don't really have control over what gets stuck in there," says Margulis. "It might be something we love, it might be something really annoying."

FULL ARTICLE >