Why are songs catchy

If mentally repeating a song is the brain 'scratching', Paul Barsom wants to pin down exactly what causes that initial 'itch'. Barsom lists several factors that might cause a song to be catchy. It's harder to own, especially on first listen. Taking familiarity a step further, Barsom adds that a cultural connection between music and listener can make a tune more memorable.

To listeners of a certain generation, for example, the music of the Beach Boys opened up a whole new world of summer and surfing. Repetition can also make a song hard to forget in two ways, Barsom says. You might only remember five seconds of the song—but sometimes that's enough. If it has a short refrain that everyone can remember, it will stick, even if it's terrible.

Lastly, a particularly appealing performance of the song may be enough to make it stick in your head. But who could possibly figure out what that is?

Paul Barsom, Professor Emeritus of music composition at Penn State argues that repetition makes it difficult to forget a song. A short refrain and the song being played constantly are two different ways in which repetition works. It remained on the Billboard charts for 8 weeks owing to the frequency of airtime it enjoyed across radio stations, music channels. The song, currently, has over 2 billion views on Youtube. It may, perhaps, be the most popular pair in the history of pop music.

Simple words can be used in every context without causing hindrance to the tune of the song. He writes the melody first and then the lyrics to fit the scansion. It is never the other way around. A line has a set number of syllables and the line that follows it is a mirror image. The chorus appears within the first 50 seconds of the song and there are melodic parts in each track.

These parts are repeated throughout the song. Lastly, the verse and the chorus have contrasting melodies. While all human emotions are universal, the tendency for all of us is to gravitate towards the more positive ones such as happiness and joy. Groove is an important part of uptempo songs and the more danceable a song is, the more likely it is to be a hit. This familiarity helps the listener immediately be able to relate to the melody since chances are, they have heard it before. Another factor is cultural relatability.

To reach this conclusion, researchers analyzed 80, chords in pop songs that have appeared on the U. Next, the team stripped the songs of melody and rhythm, leaving only the chords. They asked 39 volunteers to listen to 1, chords in 30 chord progressions from the pop songs, and rate how pleasant they were. In a separate experiment, 40 people listened to the same chords while their brains were observed using special scanners.

The experiments revealed the songs caused the amygdala, hippocampus, and auditory cortex—which help us process emotions, learn and gain memories memory, and process sounds, respectively—to light up.