Feel like a musical memory challenge?

[Blog by Jiaxin Li on TeleTunes]

Think about your favorite TV show. Can you hear the theme music already starting to play in your mind? Maybe it’s the epic sounding strings from Game of Thrones or the punchy synthesizer from Seinfeld? You’ve probably heard the music from that show so many times it’s now encrypted in your memory. As music cognition researchers, we are eager to find out what makes some TV tunes more memorable than the others.

The TeleTunes game is designed for exactly this reason. It is a game that allows us to study the catchiness of TV themes. Unlike the Christmas or Eurovision versions of our Hooked-on Music game series, this game invites you to test your memory with clips from the most iconic TV themes, curated from IMDB’s 100 most watched shows and The Rolling Stone’s esteemed “Greatest” TV show lists spanning the past 40 years. Your challenge? If you recognise a tune, quickly click the button, sing along in your mind and judge whether after a few seconds it continues in the right spot.

Through engaging in this game, you are contributing to music science, enriching our understanding of musical memory. By investigating the familiarity of these TV tunes, we are building a corpus consisting of well-known music. In the near future, we will use the results for yet another game – TuneTwins – continuing our quest to investigate questions like “what makes music memorable” or even “how do we as human beings remember music”.

We hope you will enjoy this game. Each game takes only a few minutes, and you can play it as many times as you like. Listen carefully! The fewer mistake you make, the more points you’ll earn! Finally, feel free to share the link with your friends and family and see who can get the highest score. The more you play, the more you contribute to science! 

TeleTunes can be found at: https://app.amsterdammusiclab.nl/teletunes.

What makes music catchy?

Often you only need to hear a few seconds of music, to recognize a song. There's a good chance it was a very catchy tune. Computational musicologist Ashley Burgoyne (Music Cognition Group, University of Amsterdam) reveals what makes a song catchy.

Burgoyne, J. A., Bountouridis, D., Balen, J. van, & Honing, H. (2013). Hooked: A Game For Discovering What Makes Music Catchy. In A. De Souza Britto, F. Gouyon, & S. Dixon (Eds.), Proceedings of the International Society for Music Information Retrieval Conference (pp. 245–250). Curitiba, Brazil. [pdf]

Hoe komt het dat een liedje in je hoofd blijft hangen? (4/5) [Dutch]

De hele dag dat ene hitje in je hoofd: een oorwurm! Muziekproducenten kunnen het zich niet beter wensen. Wat maakt dat liedje nou zo makkelijk te onthouden? En hoe kan het dat je dat ene nummer zo snel herkent? een ceollege over de ingrediënten voor het maken van een ware muziekhit en waardoor luisteraars zo ‘Hooked on Music’ zijn…

Voor de andere lezingen zie hier.

Bronnen:

01:30 Gjergdingen & Perrott (2008)
02:30 Margulis (2014)
04:00 Burgoyne, Balen, Bountouridis, & Honing (2013).
08:00 http://www.hookedonmusic.org.uk/ ; http://hooked.humanities.uva.nl/
09:00 Salimpoor & Zatorre (2013)

Gjerdingen, R., & Perrott, D. (2008). Scanning the Dial: The Rapid Recognition of Music Genres Journal of New Music Research, 37 (2), 93-100 DOI: 10.1080/09298210802479268

Dunsby, J. (2014). On Repeat: How Music Plays the Mind. By Elizabeth Hellmuth Margulis Music and Letters, 95 (3), 497-499 DOI: 10.1093/ml/gcu055

J.A. Burgoyne, D. Bountouridis, J. van Balen, & H. Honing (2013). Hooked: A Game for Discovering What Makes Music Catchy. Proceedings of the 14th International Society for Music Information Retrieval Conference, 245-250. Curitiba, Brazil.

Salimpoor, V., van den Bosch, I., Kovacevic, N., McIntosh, A., Dagher, A., & Zatorre, R. (2013). Interactions Between the Nucleus Accumbens and Auditory Cortices Predict Music Reward Value Science, 340 (6129), 216-219 DOI: 10.1126/science.1231059

What is the most instantly recognisable song?

Everyone knows a hook when they hear one, but scientists don’t know why. By playing the Hooked on Music game you are exploring the science of songs and helping us to unlock what makes music catchy.

Last weekend the preliminary outcome of the online game was announced in Manchester, UK at the MOSI [1], answering the question: What is the most instantly recognisable song? Interestingly, numerous media started to report on this. A small media hype? (see UvA News).



#HookedonMusic is a citizen science experiment involving the Manchester Science festival, produced by the MOSI in association with the University of Amsterdam. The project is a spin-off of a larger consortium (including the University of Utrecht, Sound & Vision and Meertens Institute) that collaborates on developping a web-based environment, so-called ITCH environment (Identification, Tagging and Characterisation of Hooks; See CogItch).

In devising an online game for all to enjoy, we try to harness the wisdom of the crowd to understand and quantify the effect of catchiness on musical memory.

Explore the online game here or download the app here.




J.A. Burgoyne, D. Bountouridis, J. van Balen, & H. Honing (2013). Hooked: A Game for Discovering What Makes Music Catchy. Proceedings of the 14th International Society for Music Information Retrieval Conference, 245-250. Curitiba, Brazil.

[1] See MOSI Press release.

Can you do better?

When I played the #HookedOnMusic game the other day, I recognized 10 songs (from the nineties) and scored 90 points. Most of you must be able to do better :-)

Play the game here.

Hooked on music: What makes music catchy?

Presentation of hooked-game at the Science Museum in August 2014.

Everyone knows a hook when they hear one, but scientists don’t know why. By playing the Hooked on Music game you are exploring the science of songs and helping us to unlock what makes music catchy.

#HookedonMusic is a citizen science experiment involving the Manchester Science festival, produced by the Museum of Science & Industry in association with the University of Amsterdam. In devising an online game for all to enjoy, we try to harness the wisdom of the crowd to understand and quantify the effect of catchiness on musical memory. Explore the game here.

Presentation of hooked-game at the Science Museum in August 2014.

For more information on #HookedonMusic see the About on www.hookedonmusic.org.uk.
For more online experiments see MCG website.

J.A. Burgoyne, D. Bountouridis, J. van Balen, & H. Honing (2013). Hooked: A Game for Discovering What Makes Music Catchy. Proceedings of the 14th International Society for Music Information Retrieval Conference, 245-250. Curitiba, Brazil.

Waarom blijft dat liedje in je hoofd hangen? [Dutch]

Waaraan herken je dat bekende nummer onmiddellijk? Waarom blijft het ene muziekfragment in je hoofd hangen en het andere niet? Om dat te achterhalen ontwikkelden onderzoekers van de Universiteit van Amsterdam, Universiteit Utrecht en het Nederlands Instituut voor Beeld en Geluid ‘Hooked!’, een game voor de iPhone en andere iOS apparaten met muziek uit de Radio 2 Top 2000 (voor de wetenschap achter Hooked!, zie Burgoyne et al., 2013). De game is vanaf vandaag gratis te downloaden in de iTunes App store voor iedereen met een Spotify Premium Account. 

Voor meer informatie zie de Hooked! website.

‘Hooked!’, een game voor de iPhone en andere iOS apparaten.

J.A. Burgoyne et al. (2013). Hooked: A game for discovering what makes music catchy. Proceedings ISMIR.

Do you know this song?

What makes music catchy? Why do some pieces of music come right back to you even if you haven’t heard them in years, while you forget others almost immediately? Hooked! is designed by researchers of University of Amsterdam and Utrecht University to answer these questions (Burgoyne et al., 2013). The game tests how quickly different parts of a song trigger your memory, and with data from thousands of players, the researchers will be able to see what the catchiest hooks of all time have been and what they have in common. The more you play, the more you contribute to science!

A free version of Hooked! can now be downloaded at iTunes.
More information of the research can be found here.
More information on the game can be found here.

J.A. Burgoyne et al. (2013). Hooked: A game for discovering what makes music catchy. Proceedings ISMIR.

Can't get it out of your head?

Imagine listening to a catchy tune. When do you nod your head and sing along? That's the hook, the most memorable part of the song, crafted by songwriters to stick in your head and exploited by DJs to get people onto the dance floor. Everyone knows a hook when they hear it, but scientists don't know why.

#Hooked was launched this week at Manchester Science Festival and will run until September 2014. During the Festival people can contribute their catchiest songs and stories to build the playlist and scientists will debate the science of what makes music catchy, from hooks, to earworms and hit songs. There will be a silent disco and shows about music with ‘Captain Hooked’ (see website for more details). Nominations for the playlist (which runs across all musical genres) will continue in the run up to the launch of the #Hooked game in early 2014.



#Hooked is an ambitious initiative of Dr Erinma Ochu, funded by a Wellcome Trust Engagement Fellowship. She did an amazing job in bringing lots of people together as well as initiating a series of activities at the Manchester Science Museum around the simple idea of finding out what makes music catchy, an idea with a potential outreach far beyond that of basic music cognition research. The hooked-game will be launched in the Spring of 2014. And, if you can't wait, you can do the Hooked questionaire here or nominate your favorite song here.

Why does this matter? Well, the experiment is all about musical memory and as such might provide insights into long term memory and even failing memory, which could contribute to future Alzheimer's disease research. See video below for further motivation:



Click here to Participate!