A fair test

Some people like to write most, if not all, of their musical ideas down as they occur; I used too. It tends to end up in a jumble of notes which, to retrieve an idea, requires more organisation than I could muster. When I switched over to writing earworms, the evolutionary selection pressure was placed on the trait of stickiness. Musical ideas still flowed but a natural test became: would I remember them after some distraction, or after doing something else, or were they totally forgettable. I might come up with a ditty, but if at the end of the day, it had gone, then it clearly didn’t make the grade. Ideally, in terms of coming up with that killer hook, the idea would just persist in my head despite my best efforts to rid myself of it. This is rather a stringent test and occasionally does work. However, it is not quite a fair test considering how catchy tunes come to stick around in the mind.

When we are exposed to a new tune it may well stick first time. More often than not, however, we tend to let it pass us by. It takes some repetition before we even notice it and begin to fix it in our minds. This is known as the mere exposure effect, or in social psychology, the familiarity principle. It is a psychological phenomenon whereby we tend to like things that we have had more experience of. Advertisers know this well, but it also applies to music: We tend to like tunes we have heard a few times.

I haven’t been able to trace the quote fully (not that it matters) but this mere exposure seems to reflect a paraphrasing of a quote from the Ian Fleming book and movie Goldfinger: “Mr Bond, they have a saying in Chicago: ‘Once is happenstance. Twice is coincidence. The third time it’s enemy action’.”  A variant being: Once Is Chance, Twice is Coincidence, Third Time’s A Pattern. Richard Bandler has said this in an NLP training when he was commenting on problematic behaviour and behavioural change.

In that, something that repeats is a pattern is pretty obvious, almost definitional. It does make sense from an evolutionary psychology perspective though. We are continuously bombarded by novel stimuli but often only once. To keep track of all the random one-shot events would be exhausting and is quite unnecessary given their unique but trivial nature: it is just noise. Where there are more incidences of an event, then there is a heightened probability that it is a pattern and will happen again. It could be an opportunity or a threat, but recognising the pattern allows us some preparedness of response even if it means a pattern is safe to ignore. In nature, pattern recognition, or learning as it is more commonly called, is a key survival trait. Hence we come to pay greater attention to and be more apt to learn, those things that repeat.

Returning to music then, a song in heavy rotation on a radio station soon becomes recognisable as such a recurring pattern; iterated playing teaches us to hum along. By mere exposure, each spin increases our familiarity by reinforcing the pattern; it may take a few listenings for a hook to coagulate into a sticky earworm. In other words, an earworm is unlikely to be formed in one shot.

Consequently, my demand that my tunes stick around after I came up with them without any reminder, as a selection criterion, was an unreasonably high bar. Of course, it would be great if they did but such occurrences are scarce, and anyway, this is not how other earworms are formed. A fledgeling idea, something that would otherwise prove promising, might be culled prematurely by heavy-handed dismissal. As other earworms are not formed in a single hearing, then that would represent unfair competition.

I’m still reticent to scribble lines and melodies down on paper or record them into my phone. That doesn’t mean that I won’t do it, but it goes against the grain of the experiment (neither is it how mere exposure works). But when I ask myself “Oh, how did that fantastic tune go that I thought of this morning?”, I now use an NLP inspired way of prompting myself – a kind of anchoring; a mental knot in the hanky. This could be a few keywords, a title, or perhaps a melody or rhythm that has a mild passing resemblance to some other tune that I can easily remember. Given such a cue then I can generally go on to recall what I was thinking and after doing this a few times then the tune is given a fair chance to settle in while still meeting the challenges of selection.