BUFFALO — That one-hit wonder that keeps repeating in your head might be an indication of your ability to sing accurately, according to a University at Buffalo researcher who co-authored a paper that examined earworms.
An earworm (also known as Involuntary Musical Imagery) is a short repetitive section of music that occurs spontaneously and is sustained without effort. They are generated by musical memories, events in the environment, like seeing a word associated with a song, hearing a song or sounds associated with a song, or being in a situation that inspires memories of a song.
Hearing about or having an earworm may smack of annoyance but they are a topic of keen interest in the field of cognitive psychology. Previous studies have used earworms to understand how musical memory and mental imagery operate, but the current paper goes a step further, providing insights ranging from the mental architecture responsible for singing to explaining differences about internal experience.
And while the findings, published last month in Music Perception: An Interdisciplinary Journal, can’t guarantee that a vivid earworm will lead to a recording contract, they fit into a general model associating singing accuracy with an individual’s music perception abilities.
“We found that people who sing accurately seem to have more vivid earworms,” says Peter Pfordresher, PhD, a professor of psychology at UB, co-author of the study led by David Vollweiler, MS, a UB graduate student at the time of the research, who is currently a PhD candidate at the University of Nevada, Las Vegas.
Pfordresher says neuroimaging evidence demonstrates how singing recruits both the perceptual and the motor parts of the brain. Before performing a song, we must first think about what to sing by generating an auditory image of the song.
“The accuracy or vividness of that auditory image, which participants ranked on a 1-5 scale, is associated with how accurately you can produce the pitches associated with that song,” he says. “If you’re a good singer, there’s a good chance your earworm is close to the original song.”
But that is only one musical ability measure explored in the study.
Surprisingly, the researchers found no link between performance ability and the frequency of earworms. Inaccurate singers had earworms just as often as accurate singers.
“The system underlying vivid auditory imaging and the ability to sing accurately appears to be different than what drives the frequency of earworms,” says Pfordresher. “We were expecting that accurate singers would have more earworms, but this wasn’t the case.”
Earworms appear to be a democratic phenomenon that could even have a place in the classroom.
“We’re trying to understand whether there are ways to intervene in straight forward engaging ways when people have trouble singing,” says Pfordresher. “If musical imagery is helping you sing better, then we can train people to create better imagery.
“Earworms can also tell us something about how the brain works and what might be the result of damage to specific parts of the brain.”
Pfordresher and Vollweiler did not plant earworms in the study’s 226 participants, although both are interested in eventually doing that. They instead relied on self-reporting that asked people to think retrospectively about earworms, assessing information based on dimensions including, but not limited to, frequency, intensity, vividness and potential for disturbance. All of which were ranked.
“David did great work on this study,” says Pfordresher. “It was a pleasure working with him.”