Earworms: What makes songs stick '“ and which tracks are the stickiest

Now academics have come up with new ideas about an age-old question: why do certain tunes have the ‘stick factor’?

The first large-scale study, led by Dr Kelly Jakubowski at Durham University, has shown that songs that get stuck in your head – called earworms or involuntary musical imagery – are usually faster, with a fairly generic and easy-to-remember melody but with some unique intervals such as leaps or repetitions that set it apart from the “average pop song”.

Prime examples of earworms named in the study include Bad Romance by Lady Gaga, Don’t Stop Believing by Journey and perhaps not surprisingly Can’t Get You Out Of My Head by Kylie Minogue.

Dr Jakubowski, from the Department of Music at Durham University, said: "Our findings show that you can to some extent predict which songs are going to get stuck in people’s heads based on the song’s melodic content. This could help aspiring song-writers or advertisers write a jingle everyone will remember for days or months afterwards.

"These musically sticky songs seem to have quite a fast tempo along with a common melodic shape and unusual intervals or repetitions like we can hear in the opening riff of Smoke On The Water by Deep Purple or in the chorus of Bad Romance by Lady Gaga."

The study, published in the academic journal Psychology of Aesthetics, Creativity and the Arts, was conducted by researchers based at Durham University, Goldsmiths, University of London and the University of Tübingen in Germany with funding from the Leverhulme Trust.

It found that the tunes most likely to get stuck in people’s heads were those with more common global melodic contours, meaning they have very typical overall melodic shapes commonly found in pop music.

An example of one of the most common contour patterns in Western music is that heard in Twinkle Twinkle Little Star where the first phrase rises in pitch and the second falls. Numerous other nursery rhymes follow the same pattern making it easy for young children to remember. The opening riff of Moves Like Jagger by Maroon 5, one of the top-named earworm tunes in the study, also follows this common contour pattern of rising then falling in pitch.

In addition to a common melodic shape, the other crucial ingredient in the earworm formula is an unusual interval structure in the song such as some unexpected leaps or more repeated notes than you would expect to hear in the “average pop song”. The instrumental riff of My Sharona by the Knack and In The Mood by Glen Miller both have this unusual interval structure.

Dr Jakubowski added: "We already know that recent and frequent exposure to a song makes it more likely to get stuck in your head and people who sing and listen to music a lot tend to get earworms more often than others.

"We now also know that, regardless of the chart success of a song, there are certain features of the melody that make it more prone to getting stuck in people’s heads like some sort of private musical screensaver."

The researchers asked 3,000 people for their most frequent earworm tunes . The data for the study was collected from 2010 to 2013.

THE 'EARWORM CHART'

1. Bad Romance - Lady Gaga

2. Can’t Get You Out Of My Head - Kylie Minogue

3. Don’t Stop Believing - Journey

4. Somebody That I Used To Know - Gotye

5. Moves Like Jagger - Maroon 5

6. California Gurls - Katy Perry

7. Bohemian Rhapsody - Queen

8. Alejandro - Lady Gaga

9. Poker Face - Lady Gaga

HOW TO GET RID OF AN EARWORM

* Engage with the song: Many people report that actually listening to the earworm song all the way through can help to eliminate having it stuck on a loop.

* Distract yourself by thinking of or listening to a different song. The top-named “cure song” for displacing earworms is God Save the Queen.

* Let it be: Others find that the best way to get rid of an earworm is to just try not to think about it and let it fade away naturally on its own.