Earworms

Historical Context

Earworms have appeared in various literary and pop cultural sources for over 100 years. In his 1876 tale, “A Literary Nightmare,” Mark Twain describes a jingle that disrupts the author's daily life up to the point where he passes it on to someone else. Alfred Bester's 1952 novel The Demolished Man features a protagonist who uses a catchy tune to block mind readers, and Arthur C. Clarke writes of a scientist who develops a melody that synchronizes with the rhythms of his brain, resulting in a catatonic state (“The Ultimate Melody,” 1957). Earworms have even featured on the children's television program SpongeBob SquarePants (“Ear Worm,” 2010).

These references provide evidence for earworms as a commonly acknowledged popular phenomenon over the course of more than a century. It has been posited that the frequency of earworm experiences may have increased in recent years due to the ubiquity of music in modern society. This possible increase in the frequency of earworm experiences may explain the recent addition of the term earworm to the Merriam-Webster Dictionary in 2012, despite the fact that this dictionary lists the term's first known use in 1802.

Notwithstanding the long historical presence of earworms in pop cultural discourse, researchers have only recently begun to use empirical methods to investigate the phenomenon.

Features

One of the most notable features of earworms is their ubiquity. One Finnish survey of almost 12,000 individuals found that 91.7 percent of people reported that they experience earworms at [Page 354]least once a week, and about one-third of people (33.2 percent) reported that they are a daily occurrence. A similar international survey (N = 5,989) found that 85.45 percent reported weekly earworms and 50.93 percent reported daily episodes.

The length of an average earworm episode has been estimated at between 8 and 27 minutes. However, earworm length remains an unresolved issue due to the subjective difficulties of estimating start and end points of each experience, and confusion over whether estimates of length relate to the segment of music, an earworm episode, or experiences of the same earworm over longer periods of time.

A small number of individual differences predict patterns of earworm experience. People are more likely to report frequent and lengthy earworms if they engage in regular musical behaviors, rate music as important in their lives, and spend money on musical activities. The relationship between musical training and earworm characteristics is weak by comparison.

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