Today’s #30DaySongChallenge pick is a two-fer! And I can’t think of any artist who deserves this kind of double-dipping more than The King of Soul, Otis Redding, an absolutely inimitable performer who always makes you want to go back for seconds.
Last year, the journal Psychology of Aesthetics, Creativity, and the Arts published a study hypothesizing that there are three key elements that make a catchy song an “earworm”: pace, the shape of the melody, and a few unique intervals. About 90% of us experience an earworm at least once a week and, according to the study, what all of those earworms share in common is that they are neither too simple nor too complex. An earworm must be familiar enough to be remembered, but not so familiar that it is easily forgotten.
How to rid oneself of an earworm is tougher nut to crack, it turns out. Many people try focusing on another song, only to find out that they’ve just replaced one earworm with another. The study’s authors recommend “fully engaging with the song”– Neil Young‘s exorcism routine is reportedly to play the earworm himself– but if that doesn’t work, the authors say, you can always go the pharmaceutical route. Apparently, anti-anxiety drugs do the trick.
My picks for today are two tracks by Otis Redding that sound very similar, “The Happy Song (Dum Dum)” and “Fa-Fa-Fa-Fa-Fa (Sad Song).” Both of them are bona fide earworms: slightly upbeat, shapely melodies with unique intervale, which are neither too simple nor too complex. Here are both:
I don’t think this was part of the earworm study, but I’ve always found that songs with nonsense sounds– “dum dum” or “fa-fa-fa-fa-fa” or (in the case of Lady Gaga‘s epic earworm “Bad Romance”) “rah-rah-ra-ah-ah”– have a way of worming their way deep into my brain more easily than songs that require me to remember the words. In fact, when I can’t remember the lyrics to an earworm, I often end up dum-dum-dumming or fa-fa-faahing it anyway. That seems to confirm that it really is the structure of the song, and not its lyrical content, that makes it catchy.
I’ve always been a little bit of a closet Pythagorean when it comes to music, which is just the sound of mathematics, after all. I believe the order of the Universe– or at least our galaxy– is fundamentally mathematical. And so, qua natural beings, I believe that we humans have a kind of hard-wired connection to the mathematical relationships and ratios of Nature. All of our best devices for making sense of our world– space, time, music, information– are coded in more or less complex mathematical formulae.
I do not think, however, that mathematics is a simple or “closed” system. (There is tremendous beauty, even poetry, in mathematics.) Nor do I think we are close to fully understanding either the explanatory or the generative powers of mathematics. (That’s the “mystical” Pythagorean in me, I suppose.) I have a healthy suspicion about the prospect of explaining human “happiness” or “sadness” mathematically, a prospect with which most of the social sciences today are enamored/obsessed, but I’m mostly fine with a mathematical explanation for why “The Sad Song” and “The Happy Song” are so catchy.
Runners-up for #30DaySongChallenge, Day 26:
- Lady Gaga’s “Bad Romance”
- Michael Jackson’s “Smooth Criminal”
- The Beach Boys’ “God Only Knows”
- The Tokens’ “The Lion Sleeps Tonight”
- Ylvis’ “What Does The Fox Say?”
- The Foundations’ “Build Me Up”