People, Music and… Psychology?

Hello again. A big part of what we do at OMG revolves around music. So I decided to try and explain why music makes you feel happy, why you get songs stuck in your head, why songs seem to follow you everywhere and why you listen to songs multiple times over on repeat. I’ll do my best. So Here. We. Go!

For parts of this post, we’ll be diving into some Music Psychology. This is a field of research that aims to explain and understand musical behaviour and experience. So that includes the ways in which music is perceived, responded to and incorporated into everyday life. This area of psychology has practical uses in areas like music performance, composition, education, criticism and therapy as well as the investigations of human attitude, skill, performance, intelligence, creativity and social behaviour. Listening to music is also proven to increase productivity, cognitive functions, creativity and decrease fatigue. And factors such as tempo and style can influence your mood! So, if you want to do more of something or enjoy a job more, listen to some music. You want to change your mood, listen to some music. Simple!

Now back to those questions I asked; it’s time to try and answer them. Maybe…

Why does music make me feel happy?

So, thanks to specific areas of music psychology, research has shown that the pleasurable feelings associated with listening to emotional music are the result of dopamine releases into our brain’s ‘reward system’. In fact, the release occurs in the same part of the brain that is responsible for the anticipatory and rewarding aspects of drug addiction. So long story short, listening to music is a healthy, addictive drug.

However, people with higher levels of empathy seem to like sadder music and this could be because they understand or are more easily moved by what they believe is the emotion conveyed by the song. Not only that but music also generates responses from the amygdala (controls and regulates emotional networks) and the hippocampus (centres around emotion around attachment) which is also why music can have you “all in your feels”.

Why does a song get stuck in my head?

Three words for you. Stuck. Song. Syndrome. Also known as an earworm. This is a type of involuntary cognition. Basically, you don’t control it, it just happens. So an earworm is linked to exposure to the song and can be brought about by experiences that trigger the memory of the song involuntarily like seeing a word related to the song, hearing a few notes from the song or experiencing feelings associated with the song.

Apparently, though men and women experience earworms equally as often, they tend to last longer in women and irritate more. The British Journal of Psychology has stated that earworms are usually 15-30 seconds long and more common in people who have a greater interest in music.If you’re looking for a cure, the aim is to get your ‘working memory’ working on something else that is somewhat difficult so maybe try reading or doing Sudoku. In some cases, chewing gum has also been found effective and if that doesn’t help maybe try getting another song stuck in your head, in your head, zombie, zombie, zombie-ie-ie, oh.

Why do I listen to the same song on repeat?

This is an interesting one. Back in 2013, Fredrick Conrad from the University of Michigan asked a whole lot of people what songs they regularly and repeatedly listen to. The song choices fell into 3 categories – happy, calm and bittersweet. But, more importantly, he also made reference to the Wundt curve, which states that a pleasurable stimulus becomes more pleasurable with familiarity until it reaches a ceiling and drops off, and this may explain why we listen to songs on repeat.

Basically, the more familiar we are with a song, the more joy we get from listening to it until that joy peaks and gradually or very quickly drops off until we don’t get the same amount of joy from listening to the song. So, in the early stages, we listen to the song a lot because it gives us our dopamine boost that we were talking about above but, once we reach the peak and begin to enjoy the song less, we get smaller and smaller dopamine boosts and, therefore, listen to the song less because it no longer has the same effect as it initially did.

Why do songs seem to follow me?

Do you ever get the feeling that you’re hearing the same song everywhere? No matter where you go it’s on the radio and it feels like it’s following you everywhere? Like that time when every radio station was playing ‘What A Man Gotta Do’ by the Jonas Brothers and you swore if you heard it one more time you’d scream.

First and foremost, songs don’t really follow you obviously. Some people believe that if you keep hearing a song over and over, that it is a message from the universe, if you believe in that sort of thing. What that message may be is entirely between the universe and you though. I’m afraid I can’t help you there.

In reality, if a song is a relatively new release from a well known artist it is highly likely that it has been categorised in radio station playlists for heavy rotation due to high request numbers for the song. Simply put: the more a song is requested, the higher the song is ranked in the radio playlists and the more you hear it. If it isn’t requested, it is less likely to be played.