The previous post has looked at some of the hurdles of selection pressure that a song has to deal with.
- A musical idea may be instantly forgettable, or may linger.
- If it lingers long enough it might present a song title.
- 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.
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