Having made explicit my thoughts around the onion rings of “Edisoning” earworms, this puts my present experiments and experience into perspective. I came away from my drive, a couple of weeks ago, with So Serendipity – a few lyrical lines that lasted through my drive home and have been bubbling around my mind since. This has made it to a rough sketch of a chorus in Cubase: basic drumbeat, piano melody, some baseline, and words recorded on a cheap mic. It is about sixteen bars looped a few times so that I can play it on my phone and review it while I’m out and about.
Having the potential to be an earworm proper is what allowed the song idea to get as far as a recorded sketch. The instrumental accompaniment has added to the earwormyness and numerous listenings, through mere exposure, had driven it into my mind. Bits of it keep looping in my head whenever I’m doing something that requires little thought: making coffee, going to the loo, writing complexed computer code, blogging. Mixed blessings, but this tonal Tetris effect indicates to me that the song is jumping through a major hoop in its career as an earworm.
The other point goes back to the onion ring theory of assembling memes. The recorded sketch was simply what was going through my head and had the inclination to do at the time – a few bars to think about and develop upon. On replaying it I can decern the bits that give rise to smug self-satisfaction from those that make me cringe. In other words, I am bashing the song against my internal model of selection pressure derived from what I have learned how music “should” be. Now that it is becoming an earworm proper, one that I have enslaved myself with, I find myself mentally hearing the bits that work well, but these lead on, sequentially, to bits that don’t. Consequently, as I’m clicking on an email, or opening a can of beans, I’m casually making variations to the ill-fitting chunks; more out of compulsion than deliberation. These mental variations are going through that good ol’ evolutionary loop, some of them making it to the next round of the onion ring thereby leading up to the next sketch recording session.
There is a method lurking in all this. That method is: to make a recorded sketch, drum it in through constant replaying, then step away from any musical equipment, letting the mind chew on whatever needs ironing out or needs keeping.
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