How do “earworms” start? Classifying the everyday circumstances of Involuntary Musical Imagery

Abstract

Involuntary Musical Imagery (INMI) or "earworms" describes the experience whereby a tune comes into the mind and repeats without conscious control. The present article uses an inductive, generative, grounded theory-based qualitative analysis to classify reports of everyday INMI circumstances, and creates graphical models that determine their relative frequency within two population samples; listeners to the BBC radio station 6 Music and an online survey. Within the two models, four abstract categories were defined that described the characteristics of the circumstances surrounding the onset of INMI episodes; Music exposure, Memory triggers, Affective states, and Low attention states respectively. We also note the variety of musical media by which exposure to a tune results in an INMI episode and discuss the impact of musical engagement on INMI experiences. The findings of the present study are considered within a framework of involuntary retrieval theory from both the autobiographical and semantic memory literatures. In addition, the results highlight the potential facilitative effects of varying affective and attentional states on INMI episodes. Keywords affective states, attention states, everyday music listening, involuntary autobiographical/semantic memory (IAM/ISM), involuntary musical imagery (INMI)

Music to the inner ears: Exploring individual differences in musical imagery

“…Although musicians tended to hear musical imagery more often, this was not surprising: their exposure to music is greater than most people, and exposure to music strongly predicts INMI prevalence (Bailes, 2006and Williamson et al, 2011. Interestingly, regardless of major, the sample on average did not report a desire for musical imagery to cease.…”

“…Another theme in the musical imagery literature is that music listening increases the frequency and content of imagery (Bailes, 2006, Liikkanen, 2009and Williamson et al, 2011. For example, Liikkanen (2009) asked people to complete popular song lyric stems and then work on a task unrelated to the study.…”

“…Such imagery has been linked to positive affective states prior to onset (Williamson et al, 2011) and during the experience . Recently, Hyman et al (2013) found that imagery was more commonly reported for songs that were liked rather than disliked.…”

“…We focused on the daily lives of a special population-trained musicians-to see if they report a different experience with musical imagery than non-musicians. Because exposure to music increases the frequency of self-reported imagery Williamson et al, 2011) and musicians are much higher in openness to experience (Nusbaum & Silvia, 2011b), we expected musicians to report musical imagery more often than non-musicians. Regarding volitional control, musicians can engage in voluntary musical imagery to mentally rehearse a piece of piece.…”

Individual Differences Predict Patterns in Spontaneous Involuntary Musical Imagery

“…INMI describes the conscious, internal experience of a musical excerpt in the absence of an external stimulus, which then goes on to repeat outside of conscious will or control (Liikkanen, 2012;Williamson et al, 2012). The colloquial term associated with INMI is ''earworms'' (a translation from the German ''Ohrwurm''); other terms include ''brain worms,'' ''sticky music'' (Sacks, 2007), and ''spontaneous musical imagery'' (Wammes & Barušs, 2009).…”