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!

Herkent u deze melodie? [Dutch]

Je zit in je auto en draait wat aan de knop van de radio. Je hoort al snel of bepaalde muziek je bevalt of niet. Je herkent een stem, een liedje of zelfs de uitvoering ervan. Iedereen doet het, iedereen kan het. En vaak ook nog eens razendsnel: sneller dan een noot gemiddeld klinkt.

Als u gevraagd zou worden om naar een reeks muziekfragmenten van 0,2 seconde te luisteren, zal blijken dat u met gemak aan kan geven welk fragment klassiek, jazz, R&B of pop is (zie luistertest). Een snippertje geluid geeft ons toegang tot de herinnering aan eerder gehoorde muziek, ook al hebben we deze serie noten nog nooit eerder gehoord. Die herinnering kan heel specifiek zijn: aan een liedje van Björk, bijvoorbeeld. Maar ze kan ook heel algemeen zijn: we herkennen een bepaald genre: klassiek, country, jazz. De nuances in klankkleur, karakteristiek voor een liedje of een heel genre, zitten kennelijk op een abstracte manier in ons geheugen opgeslagen. Daarom is de draaiknop (of tiptoets) van de autoradio zo’n succesvolle interface geworden…

Vandaag verschenen er verschillende items in de media n.a.v. van een stukje in Volkskrant over de oorwurm en de hype rond Song Pop, een app die gebruik maakt van het hierboven beschreven muzikale talent dat we allemaal delen: het razendsnel herkennen van muziek.

• Over oorwurm: Volkskrant, NOS op 3
• Over Song Pop App: Editie NL  

Gjerdingen, Robert O., & 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

Too catchy a tune? (Earworms revisited)

A spontaneously popping up melody?

It’s a well-known phenomenon in the media: once you've contributed to a radio or tv program on a compelling, general interest question, journalists will return to you with the same question over and over again, and, basically, wanting you to redo the same answer.

It happened to me a few years ago when I was asked to contribute to a Dutch TV item on the question why some melodies stick in your mind. My first answer was: we do not know. Simply because if we knew, an ‘earworm’-generating computer program would exist that can generate melodies that are guaranteed to stick in people’s mind for days. In this case I’m sure nobody would mind.

But unfortunately for science, now —five years later— we still do not know what is the nature of this phenomenon.

What we do know —mainly from questionnaire-style research— is that most people suffer from the ‘earworm’ phenomenon (also referred to as brainworm, cognitive itch, or musical imagery repetition), females slightly more than males. And that the tunes that spontaneously pop-up in one’s mind are generally not the most striking compositions. Actually, they are commonly reported as being simply irritating.

Why does this happen? And what does it tells us about our cognition? And why does it happen with music, and significantly less with text or images? What is in the musical structure of that particular fragment that makes it spontaneously pop-up from memory?

We simply do not know.

Vicky Williamson

Luckily some researchers have been successful in convincing their funding agencies that these are interesting and pressing questions. A recent example is Vicky Williamson, who, in collaboration with Lauren Stewart from Goldsmiths, University of London, succeeded in securing a grant to seriously look into this phenomenon. See a recent radio interview below. And if you are interested in contributing to their research: they still look for PhD candidates.



(Alternative link.)

N.B. In Amsterdam we will start investigating earworms as well, in a project named COGITCH* — a collaboration between Utrecht University, University of Amsterdam, Sound & Vision, Radio 5 and Meertens Institute. We will be developing a web-based environment, so-called ITCH environment (Identification, Tagging and Characterization of Hooks) to obtain large amounts of judgments from the lay audience on what makes a fragment of music easy recognizable and/or stick in one’s mind. More on this later this year.

* A cognitive itch refers to an ‘earworm’, a fragment of music that you can’t get out of your head.

Honing, H. (2010). Lure(d) into listening: The potential of cognition-based music information retrieval. Empirical Musicology Review, 5(4), 121-126.

Why does a melody stick in your mind? (Part 2)

Studying earworms (or ‘brainworms’ as Oliver Sacks names them) is a topic that would make an ideal PhD thesis: it is a striking, yet unexplained phenomenon, and a research question that is around for quite a while, and (embarrassingly for music cognition) without a sufficient answer. One of the reasons might be - comparable to studying déjà vu’s - that to think of an experiment that can capture the phenomenon when it occurs, is quite a challenge. And, as far as I am aware, no explanation has appeared, as yet, in the scientific journals.

Nevertheless, there is something to say about the structural aspects of the melodies that tend to function as earworms. Most sticky songs are relative simple in terms of their harmonic structure, but have a striking moment - the hook of the song. It is the point in the music where something catchy happens. It is precisely the moment where you would start singing a song from memory (see more at [1]). That said: this is just an after-the-fact interpretation, not a explanation.

P.S. Interested in earworms? Follow the discussion at Facebook.

[1] Dutch tv item (with subtitles) on the earworm.

Too catchy a tune ? (Part 2)

Below the fragment belonging to the blog entry of two weeks ago on the earworm:

Too catchy a tune? (earworm)

It’s a well-known phenomenon in media land that once you contributed to a TV item on a compelling —general interest— question, people will return to you with the same question over and over again, and, basically, wanting you to redo the same answer :-)

It happened to me a few years ago when I was asked to contribute to a Dutch TV item on the question why some melodies stick in your mind. My first answer was: we do not know. Since, if we knew, an ‘earworm’-generating computer program would exist that can generate melodies that are guaranteed to stick in people’s mind for days. In this particular case however, I’m sure nobody would mind. Unfortunately, now —four years later— still little is understood of the phenomenon. [And yes, again on Dutch TV]

What we do know —mainly from questionnaire-style research— is that most people suffer from the ‘earworm’ phenomenon (also referred to as brainworm, cognitive itch, or musical imagery repetition), females slightly more than males. And that the tunes that spontaneously pop-up in one’s mind are generally not the most striking compositions. Actually, they are commonly reported as being simply irritating (see examples on link below).

Why does this happen? And what does it tells us about our cognition? And why does it happen with music, and significantly less with text or images? What is in the musical structure of that particular fragment that makes it spontaneously pop-up from memory? PhD-students in cognitive science looking for an exciting relatively unexplored topic in music (neuro)cognition, jump on it!

Dutch webpage on this topic.

Why does a melody stick in your mind?