Yes, and it is a slightly odd shape. Jakubowski and colleagues took the tunes three thousand survey participants named most often as earworms, matched a hundred of them against a hundred tunes nobody named, and compared the two groups on eighty-three melodic features. Earworms had more common overall contours and less common gradients between their .
So the global shape is familiar and the local movement is not. An earworm rises and falls the way pop melodies usually do, which makes it easy to follow. The jumps between its high and low points are unusual against a large corpus of pop music, which makes it distinctive. Earworm tunes were also faster on average.
Earworms are usually explained by circumstance: a memory association, or simply having heard the song recently. Jakubowski, Finkel, Stewart and Müllensiefen asked a different question. Holding circumstance aside, does a song’s popularity or its melodic construction help predict whether it becomes one?
Popularity turned out to matter in the way you would expect. They worked from a dataset of tunes frequently named as by three thousand survey participants. Songs with greater success and more recent runs in the UK music charts came up more often. That is the easy half of the answer.
The melodic half needed a cleaner comparison. A hundred frequently named earworm tunes were matched against a hundred tunes never named by any participant, equated for popularity and song style, so that any remaining difference would sit in the music. The two sets were then compared on eighty-three statistical and corpus-based melodic features using automated classification.
Two features separated them, pulling in opposite directions. Earworm tunes had more common global than the matched tunes, relative to a large , and less common average gradients between melodic turning points. They also ran at faster average tempi. One caution: these are self-reported tunes, so the sample reflects what people notice and name, and every comparison is relative to the corpus used.
wat. An earworm moves in a familiar overall shape but gets between its notes in an unusual way.
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It turns a nuisance into something measurable. Catchiness here is not a mood or a marketing budget but a describable relationship between a tune and the body of music around it.
How do we know?
A dataset of tunes frequently named as involuntary musical imagery was compared against chart data. A hundred named tunes were then matched to a hundred never-named tunes on popularity and style, and classified on eighty-three melodic features.
What is still unknown
The tunes come from self-reports by survey participants, which depends on what people notice and remember naming. Matching on popularity and style controls much but not everything, and the corpus comparison is specific to pop.
Learn something?
Where to next
How long can a baby hold on to a tune it heard before being born?memory
Can an audience in a hall really hear a Stradivarius?music
Does a Mozart sonata really reduce epileptic seizures?music