How Earworms Reveal Our Hidden Musical Memory Skills



By Matthew G. Evans

It’s a nearly ubiquitous human experience: you’re walking down the street, or cooking dinner, or writing an email, and you suddenly realize that a snippet of a song is looping in your head. You might not remember it starting, and you might not even remember why it’s in your head to begin with — but now it just won’t go away. These persistent musical memories known as “earworms” — or, more formally, Involuntary Musical Imagery (INMI) – are quite widespread, with some studies suggesting that as many as 97% of us experience an earworm at least once a month.

But while earworms can be annoying (especially when it’s a jingle you’d rather forget), they’re also a fascinating window into how our brains process music. For example, if you had the song “Bohemian Rhapsody” stuck in your head, you’d probably have no trouble recognizing it and naming the song (or, even if you just can’t quite remember the name, you might still feel like it’s just on the tip of your tongue).

Relative vs. Perfect Pitch

This is partially because nearly all humans have very good relative pitch abilities — that is, the ability to correctly perceive and recognize the distances between notes, such as in a melody. However, for the approximately 9,999 out of 10,000 of us who don’t have perfect pitch, we wouldn’t be able to name those specific, absolute pitches (for example, being able to say “that melody starts on a C-sharp”).

But just because I don’t have perfect pitch, are my musical memories necessarily less accurate? In other words, when you have a song stuck in your head, is it playing in your head in the right key even without you knowing it? This is what I sought to investigate, along with my co-authors Pablo Gaeta and Nicolas Davidenko.

An Experience-Sampling Study

We recruited 30 people who were not expert singers or musicians, and who didn’t have perfect pitch, and texted them six times a day for a week. Each text directed them to an online survey, which always started with the question, “Is there any music playing in your head right now?” If they answered yes, they recorded themselves singing or humming the tune as best they could. We then compared these recordings to the original versions of the songs, to see how accurate they were in terms of pitch.

Our results, published last month in Attention, Perception, & Psychophysics, were surprising: 44.7% of the recorded earworms were in the exact same key as the original recording, and 68.9% were within one semitone of the original. That’s far more accurate than would be expected by chance alone. In other words, even though participants didn’t have perfect pitch, their brains were still accurately recalling the absolute pitch of the song.

Matthew G. Evans, Attention, Perception & Psychophysics

Distribution of pitch errors as shown in Figure 1 of the paper.

Source: Matthew G. Evans, Attention, Perception & Psychophysics

What makes these findings even more interesting is that the pitch accuracy of the recordings is not tied to how recently the participant last heard the song. Whether they had listened to the song that morning or weeks ago, participants were equally likely to reproduce it accurately. This suggests that the brain’s ability to remember musical pitch might be more robust than we thought — and that it doesn’t require conscious effort to access.

Previous work had already shown that people can accurately reproduce the absolute pitch of well-known songs from memory when they are asked to do so deliberately. But in our study, participants weren’t specifically choosing songs they knew well. In fact, there was no relationship between the familiarity ratings of the songs and their pitch accuracy.

How the Mind Remembers Pitch

So, what do these findings tell us about the human mind? For one, they suggest that absolute pitch memory — the ability to remember and reproduce the correct pitches of songs — is more common than we thought. Even though most people can’t identify or name notes by ear, their brain seems to be storing this information and bringing it back with impressive accuracy — and this retrieval is happening automatically.

It also points to the incredible sophistication of musical memory in the general population. Many of us have extensive musical experience from simply being exposed to music every day, whether through listening to songs, watching movies, or even scrolling through social media. This passive exposure could be training our brains to hold on to pitch information, even when we’re not actively trying to learn or remember it.

Next time you have a song stuck in your head, you can perform this experiment on yourself! Try to hold the pitch in mind while you look up the original song, and you can see for yourself — your brain holds on to accurate pitch information, even when you’re not actively trying to learn or remember it.


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