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Bittersweet songs were listened to more often than happy or relaxing songs, and provoked a deeper connection

Past Alex Fradera

It's that song. Over again. The one they play over, and over, and over. It might be your roommate, child, or colleague. The year I shared a flat with my brother, it was Worst Comes To Worst thrice daily. What are the properties of the songs that drive some people to repeatedly heed to them over and over? A new article in Psychology of Music explores the tunes that merely won't quit.

In the Autumn of 2013, the research team led by Frederick Conrad of the University of Michigan asked 204 men and women, mostly in their 30s or younger, what vocal they were "listening to most oftentimes these days". Participants mentioned mostly popular and rock songs, but also rap, country, jazz and reggae, with only 11 songs picked past more than 1 listener (the nigh ofttimes mentioned were Go Lucky, Royals, and Blurred Lines, all of which were hits in the year of the survey).

Eighty-half-dozen per cent of participants listened to their song at to the lowest degree once a week, and almost half did so daily. Lx per cent said that they liked to re-listen to this song immediately, with many enjoying a third or even fourth go. Participants reported having high levels of connection with their named song, with higher connection associated with a tendency to close their eyes during listening to devote the fullest attention to it.

Prompted to describe their chosen song'southward outcome in their own words, the participants' descriptions suggested the songs vicious into three categories. Over two-thirds were happy, energetic songs – "Pumped up! Excited! Ready to dance, sing, and love!". For these songs, beat and rhythm were important, and almost half of people who were stuck on a happy song too reported tapping their anxiety, clapping their hands or drumming on the furniture during listens. This is definitely the vibe that was driving my brother'south daily house party!

The other categories were at-home and relaxed ("It makes me feel at ease, calm, and helps me to put things into perspective") and bittersweet ("Information technology makes me feel sorry. Only not the bad kind of sad, and I like singing with it"). Bittersweet songs were the most probable to produce deep connections, and were besides associated with a greater ability to build a "mental model" of the song, as measured by how much of the vocal participants felt they could replay in their head. (This ability increased with frequency of all vocal listens, just more than so for bittersweet ones.) Bloodshot songs were listened to many more times than the other vocal types – on average 790 times, vs. 515 for calm songs and 175 for happy songs.

Repeated listening to songs is a scrap of a riddle, given previous research that tends to deport out the classic Wundt curve, which states that a pleasurable stimulus becomes more than pleasurable with familiarity until reaching a ceiling and dropping off, as happens with songs on heavy radio rotation. Merely our listeners weren't being assailed with the songs against their will (only 6 per cent of the songs were fifty-fifty on the radio during that time), they were deliberately seeking out and returning to them. For some idiosyncratic reason, a detail song speaks to this particular person, and that connectedness provides an incentive to listen securely to the song, which tin can unlock farther nuance in lyrical meaning or musical richness. And the emotional payoff is reliable, much equally is a mood-regulating drug, and that reliable payoff can be more important than the hit of something novel.

Why not review your top listens on Spotify, iTunes or Winamp – this is mine – and take a think most what they are giving you lot: a dose of energy to tackle the day, a tonic of restoring calm, or a companion to join you in walking through contradictory, circuitous feelings.

—Extreme re-listening: Songs people love . . . and go on to dear

Alex Fradera (@alexfradera) is Staff Writer at BPS Research Digest