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Applying manufacturing models and TQM process control seems to be paying off. Trying to be so methodical would seem to contradict creativity, but it does not. Creativity is bound, but there is still infinate scope within those defined limits.

By way of method, I introduced timescales and a shedule for each production. I have been trying to apply that schedule, assessing my progress, refining the details, and adjusting the plan accordingly. A couple of things stand out from the last run.

I usually start by dropping down a very basic sequence: melody (vocal guide), block chords, kick/snare beat, and some bass line. This sounds aweful – like a downloaded midi file playing a GM patch. That it is lifeless, mechanical and bland is part of the development process: it calls upon me to do something about it; to bring it to life. I get the inspiration, or rather despiration, to change the sounds, the beat, to throw in some gizmos and so on. This is actually the fun bit.

A few times, having done this, I have stood back listening and thought to myself “this is really beginning to take shape!” The thing is starting to rock and a get the feeling of excitement, satisfaction and urge to develop it more.

Getting the thrill that progress is being made seems to be a key event: a milestone. There seems to be a few such milestones along the way. Firstly it is very reassuring and reinforcing. That first sense of achievement drives me to want to work on the piece more and push through the more difficult phases like wrestling with the lyrics of the second verse. It acts like a “a-ha” moment that brings on the creativity. Secondly, it is a very recognisable milestone in terms of the production schedule. It means that I have captured the essence of the chorus, and perhaps verse as well, and can now turn my mind to such tasks as drafting the overall structure, laying down the lyrical hook or turing the thematic narrative into actual lyrics.

When some piece has started to take on life, my change in appreciation for the work has caught me a bit by surprise as being rapid and dramatic. Now that I recognise that moment, and that it is a key milestone, I can build it into my production method of scheduling. Moreover, I can look forward to, and work towards, that sparkle while I’m punching in the dull initial sequences.

Continuing with the workflow of earworms. Having established a hook that lodges in my mind, and having fleshed it out on some instrument so that it is going round my head (the default is a my old Roland stage piano – I dont have to mess around loading and configuring – just switch on and play) then I have the basis for a production. At this point I move into sequencing, usually just the chorus (if that is where the hook lies). Initially just a raw piano sound, maybe a string chord track, bass, and very basic drum pattern. I tend to throw in some electronic noodling for good measure.

This is usually about 16 bars and I’ll loop it and mix down to MP3. I put this on a firestick and play it on my car stereo as I drive around. Taking the opportunity to listen to my masterpiece really rams it into my brain as an earworm. Lodging it in my mind then allows me to reconsider the hook variations and also entices me to think about where the verses and other production aspects might head.

For a first draft, it is very basic; usually defaults that come with Cubase, rather than plug-ins or other soft synths, and no FXs. The drum pattern starts off as a basic 4/4 kick and snare. Actually it sounds quite shit at this point, but because it does, then that motivates me to think about what it does need.

Part of my current experimentation is attempting to schedule the main components of a musical project according to time constraints. In other words, project management ideas are being applied such that I can turn out a new piece reliebly every 28 days. I know (roughly) what I should be working on at any time in the project in order to meet the “deadline” as various milestones and criteia are in place. This methodical workflow pattern is a work in progress and will be documented at some point.

This blog however, is a continuation of how earworms assist (or otherwise hinder) progress. My latest production has gone through the stages indicated by the previous three posts. It resulted in a strong hook-line being sequenced and semi-produced and this did, indeed, through driving around listening to my test track, instill an earworm.

However, while the choruses were working out fine, the verses, as ever, became a struggle. It seemed that their chord structures wanted to be more sophisticated than normal. Unfortunatly, their more convoluted form changed the nature of the song. Maybe it was necessary; maybe it made for a much stronger piece, but it was no longer a trite catchy bit of pop music. I will return to this song as part of my other, more self-indulgent music project, but it has been disgarded as an earworm and rejected from my manufacturing schedule.

I suppose such a development is an example of variation and selection at work. Having made it through the early stages, subsequent variation pushed it in a different direction. Now, I could have forced the issue and shoehorned the piece into the earworm ideal, but the way that was going didn’t seem quite right and didn’t seem to be promising a suitable earworm: it was threatening deselection, as an earworm, at a later working point and so was deselected before any further effort and time was put into it.

Having other music projects, not just earworm constructs, has given me other development tracks. In this instance the piece cancelled as an earworm has simply been selected for on an alternative developmental track rather than being wasted work. The learning point here is that variants may start off fitting with the selection pressures, but via off and be rejected wholesale further down the development line.

Update

The verse and the chorus of this piece were clashing. The chorus was poppy while the verses were moody. The simple solution seems to be to split them out into two songs and in accordance with my priorities to rewrite the verses to fit the poppy choruses.

I’m finding that having a thematic narrative helps a lot. I’m currently experimenting with having a kind of “elevator pitch” a precis of about two clauses or sentences that sums the thing up. Very much like a TV schedule listing description of a programme.

The previous post has looked at some of the hurdles of selection pressure that a song has to deal with.

1. A musical idea may be instantly forgettable, or may linger.
2. If it lingers long enough it might present a song title.
3. If, some time on, I can remember the tune from the title then I might consider working on it further.

It is at this stage that I hit the ivories: I start noodling around on an old Roland stage piano that I can just switch on and play without configuing midi or messing around with corrupt drivers and all that. I usually end up with a melody and working out the chord structure of the hook or chorus. Usually, because this is being played on an actual instrument that I can hear, and not just in my own mind, the tune tends to adjust into something more musically interesting. In such cases I am getting the “mere exposure” effect from an external sound source. The result is that it becomes an earworm proper and one that does go around my head driving me insane.

Other than convincing me that it is an earworm and quite catchy, getting my own tunes lodged in my head does have certain advantages. The looping in my head becomes a kind of evolutionary loop of variation and selection. It gets more sticky. Furthermore, western musical idioms generally have choruses interleaved with verses. Repeating the chorus on its own, does not seem to satisfy something in my psyche, and so it natually leads me to working on verses to get that satisfaction. In this way, the earworm is driving my brain to refine the song I am working on wherever I am. In a way, its stickyness is helping me to write the song.

This series of posts are a documentation of my current experiments. In particular, they assess the hypothesis that the earworm phenomenon can actually assists with the music production process.

I used to scribbling every idea down least I forget what pieces of genius I had come up with. The result was that I lost the pieces of scrap paper, or had a messy pile but could not remember what I had meant when I wrote it down. Those I did recall were feable, meaning that those I forgot were frustrating.

I learned to resist making notes on random ideas so as to utilise that function of memory: forgetting. That some musical idea is memorable or forgettable is a form of selection pressure. As earworms are those that are overly memorable, then relying on memory, rather than notes, is a natual form of selection that weeds out the weaker ideas, leaving the most earwormy to go onto the next round of composition. Better selections with less frustration and mess.

New musical thoughts bumble around my mind all the time, almost to the point of being pathological. Mercifully, most of these are short lived, but there are those which are not kulled so easily, and may persist for quite some time. When they do, then they have the makings of an earworm. I tend not to take notes, but if I do recognise something that has earworm potential, I might mark it down as a possible song-title.

Owing to my production cadance, it could be quite some time before I look at that title again. Sometimes I recall; sometimes I don’t. Those that are lost simply didn’t make the grade; those I get back are clearly promising. Even if I don’t remember fully what I originally meant, I can come up with something equally good or perhaps better. At this point I’ll work on realising the tune, and that is where the earworm power comes in (next blog!)

This may take one or two posts or more. As I’m into computers and programming, software development methodologies and strategic information systems analysis have played a big part of my life: SSADM, soft-systems methodology etc. I have also studied TQM and manufacturing things like SPC. Actually, as an extreme systematizer (geek), I can’t live without trying to make a system out of something. Of course, this spills over into my Ohurwurm programme of research (notice how I refer to it?) The objective is making beats that are not necessarily artistic nor aesthetic, but catchy and quick to make – pop! The process of producing such doggerel lends itself well to the idioms of the music industry, and hit factories such as PWL and Cheiron have done just that: produced music.

Music really is just another form of software when you think about it. Being a software engineer then I am compelled by my DNA to take it that stage further: a formal methodology for music manufacturing. Formulating these frameworks is an endless work in progress of the Plan-Do-Check-Act cycle. I have whiteboards on my wall depicting all kinds of strategic matrixes and flow diagrams. I am at the stage where I have a big spreadsheet and Gantt chart for my up and coming songs and have precise dates for each task.

Most musicians and artists would run off screaming, and rightly too, as it would seem to impose deadlines and clamp creativity. My art though is the art of systems thinking – decomposing complex processes into more manageable and reliable chunks. The mission here is to experiment and document the methods of making an earworm. Hence, I will post bits of my methodology as the processes become clearer.

This is a very quick blog to introduce a term that will be used in future blogs to help clarify and utilise aspects of a noticeable phenomenon. This is whereby actions in a sequence become conditioned to each other, such that a subsequent action becomes a conditional response to the previous action in the sequence.

Cecelia Hayes has used the term Associative Sequence Learning (ASL) which seems to have the right connotations, but her term is about imitation and does not quite capture the shade of meaning I am looking for; a distinct and purpose-specific new term is required.

Conditioned Sequential Patterning is introduced to point out an extra aspect to the conditioning of responses. Classical conditioning is well explored. Here though, a sequence of actions is considered. A sequence of stimuli therefore will elicit a sequence of responses. Where this sequence forms a pattern, then the responses will also exhibit a respective pattern. If there exists an actual contextual pattern, then there is a probability relationship between preceding environmental events and subsequent ones. Given repetitive exposure to a sequential pattern of stimuli, then this probability relationship transfers to the sequence of responses. One response becomes associated, or conditioned, to the next in a sequence, and given a high probability within a familiar pattern of events, then that conditioned action would likely be appropriate; a form of expectation readiness. Hence, actions become based on prior actions in a sequential pattern. This is useful where there is environmental regularity, autopilot can be invoked as it were and the automatic sequence, itself, would be reinforced.

There are numerous implications for behavioural science and psychotherapy here. One of the things that I have noticed, given the hypothesis of conditioning subsequent and prior actions, is that cycles can occur where a latter action becomes associated with an earlier one. What might have been a final action in the sequence might be associated with the initial action. So on reaching that “final” action, the whole sequence is retriggered. The dog endlessly chases its own tail. 

For things like the ohrwurm phenomenon, we can see that a tune is a sequential pattern. Productions do have a beginning and end; an intro and outro. But the song structure has internal repetition, in terms of rhyming scheme and verse-chorus form. The verse leads to chorus leads to verse, and so the association can become cyclic; the retriggering leads to an endless loop (as my own experience would suggest). This might be a contributing factor to the persistence of an ohrwurm. If this is so, then it might be a clue to constructing really sticky earworms.

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.

Alanis Morrisette might think that earworms are ironic; they aren’t, they are just annoying.

But its one of those things, in that some might be annoying; others are not. Or at least this exposes the puzzle of earworms: why tunes get stuck in your head, and how they might be exploited?

From a cultural evolutionary psychology perspective, they are likely to have some function implicated in language learning and possibly other things. Ecoute et repete.  I get tunes stuck in my head all the time. I’ve noticed though, in trying to learn a different language, that a new phrase will often keep repeating itself. This may be has to do with Associated Sequence Learning, maybe it has the predictive power of knowing one thing usually comes after another in a pattern – if I say “Knock, knock”, then almost automatically the listener will respond “whos there?” This is part of our normalisation and cultural conditioning.

One thing I have noticed in these phrases repeating themselves, is a degree of certainty, a mildly frustrating feeling of whether I am getting it right, or might be mispronouncing something. If I get that sense that I don’t quite have it, then I become motivated to check it out and get it right. Now, the phrase or whatever goes around my head in a more satisfying way until I move onto something else. This corrective motivation could well also be a function of the whatever the neuroanatomy of the earwrom serves.

In its musical incarnation, earworms tend to be annoying. Memetics would have it that auditory parts of the brain might serve to assist with memorising new memes, but they are open to being hijacked by junk memes that are simply super-memorable. I’ve now started to notice the effect of “partial earworms”. For example, part of a song, maybe just a snippet of the chorus, that has clung to my brains. In the instance I’m thinking of, it happens to be a song I like. Whether this liking is down to the artistic merit, production quality, mere exposure, or some simply that it has stuck, is debatable. The effect it is having though is that because only a part is looping in my head, then I seem to be motivated to hear the song, again and again, to fill in the bits maybe.  Its the “waiting for my favourite song to come on the radio” phenomenon, it probably gives me a highly reinforcing dopamine blast or something; a form of addiction that radio executives seem to have hardwired knowledge of.

So, it could well be that earworms are those sound patterns that hijack our learning instincts. This feeds into my quest to assemble the perfect earworm, or moreover, the methodology for doing so. That is, to operate upon those learning instincts of mild frustration which motivate the brain to seek the relief and reward of neurotransmitter release.

But it also raises a couple of issues to be addressed in future posts: Is an earworm actually junk from the brains underlying perspective, or is it in someway, deepdown, experienced as valuable? What we might cerebrally think of as a garbage ditty; other parts of the brain might not. In this case an actual junk sound pattern (according to these other parts of the brain) would not become an earworm. Secondly, this earworm project is a research initiative for cliology. Cliology is interested in knowing stuff, but is far more interested in applying that knowledge to obtain some value. Having the magic formula for the perfect earworm might alleviate idle curiosity, but so what? Well, a direct implication is for the pop music industry – how to make a hit. The more generalised principles could be translated to other fads and fashions, but at the widest scope, the cliological implications are those of affecting culture.

I’ve frequently quoted in these blogs that ‘Dawn is the friend of the muses’. It is a Latin proverb Aurora Musis Amica which is often taken to mean ‘the early bird catches the worm’ – I hadn’t really considered the early-bird maxim as meaning anything more than getting up early means you can get stuff done. In contrast, I took the muses quote to mean that this is a time of half-awake inspiration: ideas fished from dreams. The muses and the early-bird versions clashed with me, but now, on reflection ‘catching the worm’ could well mean more than I initially thought. As a source of serendipity, the muses proverb finally got woven into an emerging song – ‘Sew Serendipity’ – it is kind of obvious in retrospect.

It is this retrospective aspect that I want to explore in this blog. Musicians often tell me that sometimes they feel like they are simply a conduit to something bigger, being far more than just playing. I also get that sense occasionally when I deconstruct the meaning of my own lyrics. It is quite common to listen to someone else’s lyrics and try to figure out what they are saying – the assumption being that they were fully aware of what they were trying to convey. I gathered that, when writing my words, I knew what I was saying, but being encrypted in poetry, others might reach a different meaning to them. At first, it seemed like a bit of an intellectual cheat to come up with a more profound background to something I had already written, making it a bit more deep and meaningful than what I was really thinking when I came up with the line.

My certitude is now challenged. I do at times sense that I am merely an instrument for the muses to play on; that I am a medium for bringing ideas out of the twilight. I only get a superficial meaning of the songs being played through me until later reflection when the deeper meanings of this koens crystalise into enlightenment. This could equally be the experience of many songwriters. OK, that is a bit metaphysical, even for me so let’s look at this psychologically. I do labour over lyrics, but their source inspiration is a harmonic of ultradian rhythms of chronobiology and the shifting frequency bands of the brainwaves. Periodic slumps in cognition, which occur through the course of a day, are a chance to take a mental break. The brain slips into theta waves: a more meditative and creative state also found in REM dreaming. In these states, the mind is highly active but seems to exhibit more connectivity between the seemingly unrelated thoughts. In sleep, the psychedelic nature of dreams suggests that such peculiar couplings are particularly prominent, but on the amnesia of wakening, much is lost. Perhaps they are not so much as forgotten but rather submerged in the murky other-than-consciousness, only to be elevated into view when some experience “breaks” the dream.

Post rationalising on my own lyrics seems to have this effect. It is as if the words are subconsciously referring to something that I haven’t realised yet; I pen them with only a partial understanding. In recognising this incompleteness, I am afforded with further introspection about what I could be trying to say. I gather that I am not trying to make them appear more cleaver, rather, it is an admission that I was unaware of other underlying interpretations that my unconscious mind was attempting to tell me. In the groggy state of trying to wake up, my mind, half asleep and still dreaming, is still drawing upon its surreal fantasies: Aurora Musis Amica!

Curious stuff. But there is a practical upshot. That tricky second verse is the bane of lyricists – making it fit with the narrative arc of the song theme as a whole. I’m finding that my own initial surface structure understanding of my songs belies their deeper meanings. A song’s theme often turns out to be something more involved and wider than my original conceptualisation. In accepting that I might only have a glimpse of what my subconscious is thinking then the hermeneutic doors swing back open, exposing further fascinating avenues to explore. Summoning the muses gives access to much wider perceptions of the song theme, and seems to make it easier to mould it into a fuller form – and somehow make me feel cleaverer.