Stumbled upon this article while researching reasons why Wes Montgomery is so good; Not because I was looking for an objective fact; Rather, just wanted to read some of the love others have for his voice
While reading this article it struck me how well written the article is. Certainly the subject is relatable and Wes is more of a grace note than the melody of this article, yet the article was written by a human who has found Wes and elevated him to his pantheon of "repeatability", making this article ultimately worth reading and sharing. Maybe even....more than once
You could append “(2016)” to the title if the edit window is still open. Generally older articles that get posted to HN have it so that readers know it’s not new news. /cc @dang
I appreciate this. I’ve had days where at work I’ve played a new song I’ve gotten into at least 30 times, sometimes with a few songs to break it up, often not though. I’ve always assumed it was slightly strange, but also probably not that strange. I also relate to the authors explanation. I’ll get tired of a song eventually, for a while, but one day come back to it and get into another usually less intense loop.
I don’t really understand what happens, but to be honest, I’m not really sure I’m bothered by my lack of understanding either. It’s just an experience that I can explain simply “I listened to this song on repeat 37 times today”, and yet I can’t explain it at all “Why does this happen? Why this song from an anime I’ve never seen? Beats me!”
Once you sleep on the song once or twice the enjoyment fades. Like that favorite song from the radio, you listen 4 or 5 times over several days and the excitement is gone. So you mine as well enjoy it 40 times in a row on day one.
I'm the complete opposite. Playing music on repeat ruins it. But if I listen to a song/album relatively rarely, it feels just as good every time. I also notice new subtle details once in a while, and that makes it even better.
I have songs that I absolutely love and have loved for years now. I just make sure not to overdo it.
Feel like this is probably a better way to manage it if I'm being honest. Actually, this is a bit of a similar way I'd listen to jam bands (Grateful Dead, Phish, Railroad Earth, etc.) Usually too long to listen to on repeat, but interesting enough to listen to many times and pick up on things.
For me the enjoyment fades only if the song itself is not very good to begin with; I start to notice the flaws and after a while I start to hate it and wonder why I even liked it in the first place. Good songs tend to pass the test of being listened to on repeat for me.
For me, I think short term this is kinda how it works. Although a point I'd make is that is not that I enjoy it less often, it's just that I move onto other things.
Long term though, songs I loop like this can always return and restart their cycle. So it doesn't completely ruin it for me or anything after a few days.
In a year or two, that song might be able to bring you back to that point in time. I've started building playlists by the year I discovered the song. It's a trip.
When I was younger I would get hooked on a CD. I'd do it so much that the current game I was also hooked on and the music I was listening to get intertwined into a single memory (if I see the game I remember the music, and vice versa).
These days with Spotify I get hooked on a single song and will often play that song over and over for a week or two.
I had this with books! I would play one album per book. And still when I pick up the book I hear the music and know where I was when reading it. And the other way around. When I hear the album I see the pages of the book again.
> I’ve listened to Montgomery’s Impressions recording for as long as an hour straight
I've spent many consecutive days with the same song on loop for several hours a day. Was hoping this article would validate that a bit more, but I'll take what I can get.
Yeah really, I've listened to the same 11-second loop for over an hour! (William Basinski's "El Camino Real")
By the way, for all you loopheads out there, here's a protip: drop the song you're looping into Audacity and slow it down by 5%. It tricks your brain into processing the song as "new" again, so you can wring a few more listens out of it.
This reminds me of this classic bit of radio I stumbled onto.
A WFMU DJ playing Bob Dylan's 17 minute long ballad about J.F.Kennedy 'Murder Most Foul' over and over for three hours.
It's archived here. https://wfmu.org/playlists/shows/92415
haha, i literally have been playing a song on loop all day today. I've probably heard it 30 or 40 times. I wasn't aware other people also do this. It's like the music is stuck in my head unless I listen to it. Then after listening enough I can let it go.
Semi professional musician here. Repetition goes way beyond what the author mentions:
- Most music is highly repetitive, often recycling 2 or 3 short segments (chorus, verse) with minor variations to fill out a whole song. Coltrane is known for his avant-garde composition, and even he repeats (often on a much smaller scale than a pop tune).
- The work of being a musician is repetitive. Learning (memorizing) songs takes reps! Then you've got to keep them fresh, teach them to new band members, etc. You probably have a limited book, and you know what the crowd pleasers are. Unless you're big enough to have a following cutting a song you're sick of isn't a problem, but filling out a set might be. Between rehearsal, gigs and practicing at home I probably play through most of my band's book at least twice a week.
- Being a musician is very physical, which means you're drilling exercises in your daily routine. As a brass player, I run more or less the same set of warmups, range builders and flexibility exercises every day. Drummers do rudiments. String players have their own shtick.
As far as listening to music, I don't typically put something on repeat unless I'm trying to transcribe it. But I'll listen to a song, and there's a chance it'll play on repeat in my head all day (or all week!). Steely Dan and LCD Soundsystem are particular earworms for me. It wasn't until college I realized this isn't true for many people.
I think this is right. A lot of my favorite music finds ways to rotate what's repeating. It finds a balance of keeping the groove while still playing with the listener's expectations. But, to your point, if there isn't enough repetition, there's not enough to grab hold of. Obviously, it depends on what you're trying to accomplish, but for most applications, you want to give the listener engaged with your music.
Beyond, or beneath, song structure, I've noticed that experienced songwriters repeat notes in their melodies more often than people starting out.
mpv skips forward a minute with the up key (sometimes to keyframes by default, but not with flac it seems) and it surprises me a bit how often you can do that and the music doesn't change at all, or only changes slightly :/.
> He intentionally tried to avoid repetition in his works. I was into his string quartets for a while about forty-five years ago but haven’t heard them since.
I'd argue that the lack of repetition led to things being less memorable.
"On the opposite end of the spectrum is Elliott Carter. He intentionally tried to avoid repetition in his works."
Yes, exactly ! That is why Elliott`s work sound like instruments talking to one another, like 4 instruments talking to each other with emotions & expressions each instrument having a specific character.
On the other hand generally we perceive some degree to repeatability as music.
> On the opposite end of the spectrum is Elliott Carter. He intentionally tried to avoid repetition in his works.
Aha! So this is what the local classical radio station was playing during its avant garde sets.
Elliott Carter - String Quartet No. 1 is, I find, a deeply deeply irritating work, moreover its advocates are pretentious in the same vein that avant garde jazz muzos are, witness the comment, "Carter always wrote such visceral, intense music for strings. I suspect he really loved the physicality of string instruments." Yeah, right, sure. Call me a philistine, I don't care. Spare me.
A lot of Baroque music is through-composed. For instance, the Prelude and Fugue forms that J. S. Bach composed some of his music in don't contain outright repetition, or not very much. Themes recur, of course, but in different settings: differently harmonized, in different keys and so on. The two-part form features repetition that may be omitted: while it's common to perform AABB, it can just be AAB, or AB. Sometimes there is a slightly alternative ending in B for when it is followed by A again. The Rondeau form has explicit repetition: AA BA CA ... XA.
Baroque music is often highly repetitive (even fugues are a form of material repetition!) - I would think there was a distinct trend from the 1600s to the mid 1900s where classical music became more and more through composed, until minimalism became suddenly popular.
I think, you cannot have unity in a musical work if there is something new at every turn which does not reappear in any shape or form. In the best music from the Baroque era, there is new material throughout a piece. Many passages introduce motifs that do not make a reappearance. Or make a disguised reappearance just once.
I think, you will be hard-pressed to find two identical bars in a Bach fugue, where all the voices are doing exactly the same thing that was heard before. Even if a recurring theme appears, it's in a different way. Blatant copy and pasting is basically anti-fugue. Fugue-fail.
I'd agree it's rare to have exact repetition of a whole measure across all staves in a fugue, but you can certainly write a fugue using an initial theme and nothing but copy & paste with pitch shifting. Which you couldn't do for, say, a typical solo piano work by Scriabin or Messiaen...
My stepfather is a composer who follows in the path of Ives, one of Carter’s influences. Have been to quite a few concerts by many composers and musicians emulating Ives and Carter and others. As an amateur jazz & classical musician myself, I can understand some of the ideas my stepfather talks about, in the sense of academic concepts. The music in general doesn’t grab me or move me other than in fleeting moments perhaps, the lack of (to me) discernible patterns leaves me feeling like I have nothing to grab onto. I’d love to hear how you (or anyone) enjoy this music, what about it inspires you, what you like about it, does it evoke emotions, how is it similar or different from more mainstream music, etc. For a long time the question in my head has been, am I not enjoying this music because I don’t understand it, or am I just a person who enjoys only certain kinds of music.
> I’d love to hear how you ... enjoy this music ...
I can’t say I do enjoy that music, to be honest. When I was in my late teens and early twenties—as I said, around forty-five years ago—I was attracted by the notion that some 20th century classical composers were breaking new ground, throwing off old-fashioned constraints, being revolutionary, etc. I had studied traditional music theory and learned to play Mozart, Haydn, Beethoven, etc. on the piano, and those more recent composers’ formal experimentations seemed exciting. My youthful rebellious infatuation with their music didn’t last long, and ever since I have listened to more conventional tonal music—not only Western classical but also rock, folk, jazz, reggae, etc.
I did get a bit more out of Elliott Carter when I was young, though, than I did out of other avant garde composers. Amid all the disorder there was something trippy and emotive about his music. These days, for a similar effect, I listen to Bach fugues, which have been mentioned by other commenters here. If anyone is interested, here’s an arrangement of the Art of Fugue that I listened to for the first time the other day and really liked:
> Most music is highly repetitive, often recycling 2 or 3 short segments (chorus, verse) with minor variations to fill out a whole song. Coltrane is known for his avant-garde composition, and even he repeats (often on a much smaller scale than a pop tune).
I'll note that a pop music current that has, I think, even less repetition than someone like Coltrane was the Progressive Rock genre, especially the originals in the early 1970s. Bands like Yes, Genesis, King Crimson, Pink Floyd, Gentle Giant - they were all producing 10-20 minute songs that used repetition sparingly, instead of relying on a typical verse-chorus-verse structure. Not exclusively, mind, but each had quite a few, typically as centerpieces of their albums.
I'll give them a listen. I've tried to listen to a few things like Marillion and Dream Theater before, but it didn't seem to me that they get anywhere close to something like Yes' Close to the Edge. I'd be happy to find some other band that maybe does, especially if they are even newer.
My entire late 80's high school days were pretty much just listening to Marillion over and over again until my Walkman would wear out the cassette and I'd have to get another copy. Just something about Fish's brooding bitter anger appealed to my angsty teenage mind. Once Fish left though, they quickly moved away from what I was interest in listening to.
These days the one prog album I seem to keep going back to is "Tales From the Lush Attic" by IQ, although "Relayer" by Yes has been getting some good play lately.
I am in the beginning of a personal re-awakening with Marillion. I largely stopped following the band after _Seasons_End_ (despite liking that album). Much like Pink Floyd, I felt that the Whole was greater than the Sum of the parts: without his band to keep him grounded, Fish went into the weeds. Without their jester, the band seemed lessened lyrically.
But: I recently started exploring what they've done in the decades hence, and I am gaining a new appreciation of Hogarth's vocal expression. I find the studio/album version of the song "When I Meet God" to be particularly haunting.
P.S. On Youtube there is a 2-person band named Fleesh that has done spectacular covers of songs like /SFaJT and /Season's End/. Highly recommended.
I keep going back to them occasionally to see what they're up to. I agree, Hogarth has some great vocal skills. "Memory of Water" on "This Strange Engine" is stand out, and much of the album "Brave" is really good. But they still have never really clicked for me. Definitely agree on Fish going into the weeds. I really, really wanted to like his solo stuff, and I do go back to "Vigil" occasionally, but most of his stuff is just rambling and doesn't have the backing band to make it work.
ETA: Oh my goodness, that lady in Fleesh has a beautiful voice. Their version of "Sugar Mice" is stunningly great.
I’ve found that Fish solo is much more satisfying than Fishless Marillion. Steve Hogarth’s vocals seem completely without character to me, especially compared to Fish.
You might like Spock’s Beard. The first 6 albums with Neal Morse have kind of a Yes meets Gentle Giant vibe to them. I like the later stuff as well, but I remember introducing a prog-loving friend to them with a post-Neal show and it was interesting how he managed to pick out the Neal Morse–era songs (and only those) they did as his favorites.
I'm not a professional musician, but I've played and performed in different settings for about 15 years.
Until reading your comment, I didn't realize that many people don't get songs stuck in their head. I often get very long and complex songs stuck in my head for hours to days. Sometimes it's just portions, but sometimes it can be the full song.
I don't quite know how to describe my recollection of music, but it seems to be somewhat akin to eiditic memory, but for sounds. After looking into things, the term eichoic memory seems to come up, but I'm not sure it quite encapsulates what I'm trying to express.
Out of curiousity, do you have aphantasia? I do, and often wonder if the strength of my music recollection comes from a lack of visual recollection in my mind.
Sometimes it takes a few listens to fully memorize a song, but I can revisit music many years later and still have perfect recollection of the piece despite the complexity of the music I tend towards.
For example, my favorite band is Between the Buried and Me (a progressive metal band) and their compositions tend to use a ton of complex and mixed meter, as well as non-repetitive rhythmic patterns. Despite all that, I have perfect recollection of their music—even for songs over 17 minutes long.
Sorry for the long response—your comment just triggered some things I've been thinking about for a while and I wanted to process them and share.
I have aphantasia, and I also remember songs in multiple parts vividly. I won't go so far as to say it's eichoic--I can't, for example, turn around and just play a version of it on piano like some people I know, and I'm fairly sure I'm recalling an approximation in a lot of cases--but it's a detailed enough recollection I can "listen" to songs that way by recalling them. It's very much in contrast to my non-existent ability to recall even a familiar image.
I've considered cause/effect on this before and personally just decided it was probably coincidence combined with my poor visual memory making the other types seem that much more impressive. There's no particular compensatory mechanism I can think of that would explain remembering sound better because I remember vision worse.
Interestingly, I've never been any better at composition (i.e., imagining novel music) because of this. To the extent I've composed, I still pick stuff out a part at a time and figure out how it fits rather than starting with a finished sound in my head to recreate.
I view things like perfect pitch as distinct from a strong musical recollection. With effort, I can transcribe music and eventually learn it, but it's a separate skill in my mind.
The ability to "listen" to songs by recalling them is more what I was referring to when discussing my experiences. I'm with you on the non-existent ability to recall imagery.
I have no idea if there is some type of connection between the two, but it's interesting that at least two of us seem to have similar experiences!
I once had a gig playing piano at a restaurant. It was a weekday mid-day stretch and I was scheduled for about 3 or 4 hours, as I recall. I put together about a 90 minute set of stuff out of my fake books that I figured I could do without embarrassing myself and surely no one would stay at the restaurant longer than 90 minutes.
Well, being weekday mid-day, the restaurant was nearly empty and there was some guy who sat there by himself for over two hours. I ended up taking some of my standards and doing what I could to stretch them out, playing lots of repeats, doing extended improvs over the changes. I turned Herbie Hancock’s “Chameleon” which I normally did as about a 4–5 minute piece following the structure of the Maynard Ferguson version which was the basis for the charts that I originally learned the song from into a 10 minute piece with extended improvs and some bonus repeats. “Night Train” turned into another 10-minute number. And this guy just did not leave. Finally, when I was almost out of material, he got up, dropped a twenty¹ in my tip jar and headed out.
⸻
1. I also got paid by the restaurant, but as I recall, he was the only customer out of the single-digit number of diners in the restaurant who left a tip.
You know that feeling when you wake up in the morning, and the first thought in your head is the sound of the song that's been there for 3 days already? You must have been dreaming the song before you woke up!
Back in the beforetimes, when I went to an office, I'ed play Chameleon by Herbie Hancock when I rode the bicycle in. It's just under 16 minutes long, and I'd use it as a way to time my ride, aiming to get door to door before the song finished.
Sometimes I'm doing "critical listening" and I'll repeat the same song many times carefully examining the interplay between instruments, vocals, effects, rhythms, whatever - and intentionally re listening to it over and over so I can concentrate on one specific interplay each time through.
Sometimes I'm just drowning out next doors power tools of vacuum cleaner, and one song on repeat is just as good as a playlist.
But I grew up in the golden era of albums, and I love to listen to a whole album in the order the artist carefully curated them into. I _can't_ listen to a single song off Dark Side Of The Moon, I need to hear the entire album end to end. (And I will stab anyone who plays the songs out of order - let that be a warning to any Spotify engineers or product managers I ever meet...)
The thought alone of playing Dark Side Of The Moon on shuffle makes me shudder. Why anyone would butcher albums that way is beyond me.
Even my own playlists (of electronic music, which doesn’t tend to be released as albums) very quickly attain a ‘canonical’ order to my own ear. It’s jarring when the anticipation of the next track is disrupted.
While I agree and feel the same jarring effect when listening to songs outside their album context, I've accepted that as the past of commercial music. The present and future lies on listening to singles.
I have what feels like an infinite backlog of bands and albums I want to listen to.
My quirk is deep dives. I'll discover a new band or style to me, then listen to as much of it as I can. Very often someone's whole catalogue at a time.
I'll occasionally repeat an album many times - recent examples are both Pixvae's albums or Ott's new album Heads (after 8 years waiting)!
I think you're missing out. There's plenty of music that almost requires repeated listening to even begin to appreciate. Leonard Cohen definitely requires this treatment. His texts are so laden with multilayered metaphor you simply can't even begin to unpack most of them by merely listening to them once. A lot of hip-hop also falls in this category, because just like with Cohen, the emphasis is on the lyrics and their delivery rather than the beat.
No need to make it a goal to try to get through it. Most stuff sounds sufficiently the same anyway that it doesn't really matter. If you enjoy it, press repeat!
Back in my first job we had a CD drive but somehow only one music CD, so me and the other guy in that office just kept listening to that one all day.
Now despite access to all the music in the world, I still have per-project playlists. So I might listen to the same ten songs again and again for weeks on end, as starting the soundtrack quickly puts me in the mood to resume work where I last left off.
I've also adopted a mild superstition that it's bad to listen to the soundtrack for a project that failed.
With me it's similar: I don't play individual songs on repeat, I play whole albums (mostly on Spotify however, not on CD). But I change the album once in a while. Listening to new music or one of those endless Spotify playlists doesn't allow me to concentrate on programming, the music has to be familiar.
I often listen to the same song on repeat for days in a row during periods of intense work. Usually "Djohariah" by Sufjan Stevens. It helps that it's like 17 minutes long. But I also listen to "Saturn" by the same artist, which is only 3 to 4 minutes long. It kinda puts me in a trance.
" And is it cognitively normal -- not to mention socially normal -- to listen to so many songs[...]on repeat, day after day after day?"
Even provided it wasn't normal, how any person engages with art is up to them and it doesn't require someone else's approval. No need for your tastes to be normal.
And as Nabokov used to point out, a good reader, that is an active and creative reader is a rereader. Same goes for music. Many incredibly talented people spend their entire lives studying and playing a handful or maybe only even one composer, so why shouldn't listeners do the same.
Interesting that you bring that up (rereading). I found that the first and foremost reason to learn at least a few poems by heart is that you will be able to "reread" them at will without the printed text: on the bus, in the shower, etc. It helps you appreciate the text so much more.
Active listening is a real pleasure. Qualitatively, it’s a very different experience to having music on in the background while doing some other activity, and it merits listening on repeat.
Mentally separating out the different voices in the composition, listening for how they enter and exit the soundstage, how that layering of sound builds up the texture of the music, not to mention melody, harmony, dynamics, pacing, phrasing, repetition, structure, timbre, rhythm, and the interplay of all these factors.
I'll sometimes play a new song on repeat with some strange aggressive need to hear it over and over, and then the very next day wonder why I was so into that song.
Neither the article mentions it nor is it somewhere in the comments so far: Common TikTok wisdom seems to be that listening on repeat is an ADHD thing.
I wonder if there is something to it or if it's just one of those oft repeated 'facts' that run by themselves after a while?
I came here looking to see this comment, but I think honestly TikTok is really damaging for people wrt mental conditions and understanding them.
There is a TON of mis-information and "I have condition x and behavior Y" correlation/causation BS on TikTok. There's articles of people developing "tik tok tourettes syndrome" from watching videos of other with Tourettes. There's a growing literature of the affects of follow-along mental health conditions coming from watching other people on media with certain issues. I've seen a ton of TikTok ADHD claims that are BS or are "normal" but people shared as ADHD symptoms. I don't know how, but I suspect this sort of mis-information is bad for society.
That said, I'm not a doctor/psych but I think its true that this is also an ADHD behavior. The article talks about how the author will listen to certain songs forever, but I think the ADHD behavior is a binge-and-forget type behavior, which seems different, and more related to the hyper-focus aspect of ADHD.
Source: I have adhd, do this with music, and recreationally learn about ADHD for fun.
I'm terrified of this. I've no idea why, but if I hear a song too many times in a couple day period I have a night of fever dreaming where I wake up over and over again to the song in my head. It's like my brain has over conditioned the pathway for that song and as soon as it starts trying to dream it falls into it and the dream breaks and I wake up. It happens to me a couple times a year and when I hear any of the songs it's happened with before I feel a deep physical revulsion.
I kind of wonder if it's a symptom of something but am otherwise more or less 100% neurotypical so I think it's just a weird quirk.
Exact same thing with me, to the point where I have to deliberately avoid listening to some tracks to avoid insomnia triggers. It wears off with most tracks, but I still can't hear "See-Line Woman".
I've had this happen with various Ace Attorney soundtracks[1]. The best bit of advice I found to beat the earworm was to play the song to the end in my head. Which didn't help a bit, because every song on those soundtracks has a loop point.
I hope you never have to work retail, they often have the same approved songs on repeat all day.
I worked at a gym, and to this day, there are songs I don't even like that pop up in my head. 3 years of hearing them every day just about drove me spare.
My dad still whines about Peter Frampton due to his time on a submarine in the late 70s. Could only take so much vinyl out to sea and I guess shanties were out of fashion haha.
I personally tend to listen to full albums repetitively. Lately it has been Billy Cobham’s Spectrum and some Khruangbin albums. I also play drums and tend to study the same handful of songs for a few months at a time. Ok maybe I’ve been meditating on Stevie Wonder’s Superstition for over a year haha.
Khruangbin is great work/focus music, they sink into a groove and stay there for a while so you don't get distracted too easily. Their early stuff with no lyrics was even less distracting but they don't go heavy on the lyrics anyway.
Yup, it sucks. For me it isn't even so much the song as it is how it transports me back to that job. Like, I hear the song and can picture myself doing certain tasks in the retail store I worked at while listening to it.
> I've no idea why, but if I hear a song too many times in a couple day period I have a night of fever dreaming where I wake up over and over again to the song in my head.
Do you use stimulants of any kind? I have a pet theory that even high doses of caffeine can lead to earworms or IMI. I think there’s even OTC medicines that are well known to contribute to earworms.
I get it when I substitute methylphenidate with caffeine for a day or so (which is how I keep myself below 20mg MPH a day), and usually just at the crash point.
I once had a song stuck in my head every day for over two years! It got to the point I would hear a note from the melody with every step. Walking up stairs was horrible. The worst part was I didn't know what the song was. I figured out the melody on the piano, and once I finally figured out the song, it eventually stopped.
The song? A stupid commercial jingle. "Meow meow meow meow..."
There was a period in my life when a mantra(?) of sorts was stuck in my head. Just a short phrase or word (I think actually for a long stretch the number "256" was stuck in my head). For reasons unknown to me I would repeat the phrase in my mind or under my breath — seemingly as a way to either keep focus on some current thought or to derail the current thought. I don't remember which.
I think I was under a lot of stress then — I have worked on a team or two where the project (and management) were stressful. So likely that is it.
(Also a tell: I began to notice my handwriting when I signed checks was deteriorating to something scrawly, uncontrolled — when I switched teams and made other changes in my life to reduce stress I found my signature return to the more graceful strokes I was used to.)
Musically, there is (still) often a song stuck in my head. But I put music on in the background nearly every day, seems to keep the song in my head moving along to something new....
I never really made a connection with music getting stuck in my head, but I often get short phrases or words stuck in my head on constant repeat for days at a time too.
The stress relationship may have something to do with it though. The times where it happened the most are pretty strongly correlated with high periods of stress in my life as well.
It often happens for words that I realized I was pronouncing wrong from only having read them and never having heard them. For example, sepulcher and dais come to mind as words that I repeated internally with no control for days on end and they're both words that I was mispronouncing until I heard them while reading and listening to an audiobook at the same time.
A song stuck in my head can make me restless all night as well.
One fix I’ve found that often works for me is listening to instrumental jazz every night before bed. It’s variable/random enough that it knocks the stuck song out of my mind without replacing it with another. Search for “jazz for sleep” playlists, there are a few decent ones out there.
As an adult I never experienced this, but I have vivid memories of staring up at the ceiling at 3 AM hearing "Paradise by the dashboard lights" play over and over and over again as a teen.
Wow, surprised to hear this happens to other people! When I discover a new song I love, I'll nearly always have a night where I wake up with the song blaring in my head. Even if I don't know the song that well, my mind somehow reproduces intricate detail and fills in instrumental or lyrical gaps. In my teens and 20s I had really severe ear worms, some lasting for days or weeks. Fortunately that has lessened with age, but the nighttime concerts are still a regular occurrence.
Ironically, this happened to my daughter after listening to Duran Duran's "Last Night in the City" which starts with the prominent lyric "I'm not gonna sleep tonight"
Hits on the key point, in my opinion. Repeating songs, phrases, rhythms can by hypnotic and put the listener/performer into a trance-like state. Something that can be quite enjoyable and even addictive.
I find that listening to music with lyrics simply won't do it for me. It must be instrumental only. Something like Keith Jarrett, Earthless or a good Frank Zappa vamp. Time no longer has meaning. It's wonderful!
Sadly, the enjoyment of popular music has been so decimated by dynamic compression that I rarely repeat a song mastered (or, heaven forbid, "remastered") since the mid-'90s.
What should be very catchy music is now a fatiguing wall of noise that you just don't want assaulting your eardrums any more.
Yep. It's so insidious, stupid, and destructive. Every recording artist and consumer has superb fidelity available, and yet today's music sounds like absolute shit.
I have 45s from the '80s whose sound quality utterly destroys all-digital masters from the last decade. And that's not a digital-vs.-analog thing; I can make MP3s out of those 45s that will still destroy "lossless" versions of the same song on Apple Music.
190 comments
[ 1.7 ms ] story [ 88.3 ms ] threadStumbled upon this article while researching reasons why Wes Montgomery is so good; Not because I was looking for an objective fact; Rather, just wanted to read some of the love others have for his voice
While reading this article it struck me how well written the article is. Certainly the subject is relatable and Wes is more of a grace note than the melody of this article, yet the article was written by a human who has found Wes and elevated him to his pantheon of "repeatability", making this article ultimately worth reading and sharing. Maybe even....more than once
You could append “(2016)” to the title if the edit window is still open. Generally older articles that get posted to HN have it so that readers know it’s not new news. /cc @dang
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Mw7Gryt-rcc
I don’t really understand what happens, but to be honest, I’m not really sure I’m bothered by my lack of understanding either. It’s just an experience that I can explain simply “I listened to this song on repeat 37 times today”, and yet I can’t explain it at all “Why does this happen? Why this song from an anime I’ve never seen? Beats me!”
(I might have hit that count with Lebanese Blonde by Thievery Corporation a few years back...)
You can't believe it; you were always singing along
It was so easy and the words so sweet
You can't remember; you try to feel the beat
-- Regina Spektor, Eet - https://youtu.be/nlK0zYZLBGY
I have songs that I absolutely love and have loved for years now. I just make sure not to overdo it.
It was good that there were songs that hooked me early because I would wait patiently through the less-appealing songs for those good ones.
Some months or so later, the tracks had flipped — burned out on the hooky songs, loving the once-meh songs.
(I can specifically remember this to be the case with both Murmur and Reckoning when they came out — yes, I am old.)
Long term though, songs I loop like this can always return and restart their cycle. So it doesn't completely ruin it for me or anything after a few days.
In a year or two, that song might be able to bring you back to that point in time. I've started building playlists by the year I discovered the song. It's a trip.
These days with Spotify I get hooked on a single song and will often play that song over and over for a week or two.
and
In-sides - Orbital
been stuck there for 25 years or so
I've spent many consecutive days with the same song on loop for several hours a day. Was hoping this article would validate that a bit more, but I'll take what I can get.
By the way, for all you loopheads out there, here's a protip: drop the song you're looping into Audacity and slow it down by 5%. It tricks your brain into processing the song as "new" again, so you can wring a few more listens out of it.
- Most music is highly repetitive, often recycling 2 or 3 short segments (chorus, verse) with minor variations to fill out a whole song. Coltrane is known for his avant-garde composition, and even he repeats (often on a much smaller scale than a pop tune).
- The work of being a musician is repetitive. Learning (memorizing) songs takes reps! Then you've got to keep them fresh, teach them to new band members, etc. You probably have a limited book, and you know what the crowd pleasers are. Unless you're big enough to have a following cutting a song you're sick of isn't a problem, but filling out a set might be. Between rehearsal, gigs and practicing at home I probably play through most of my band's book at least twice a week.
- Being a musician is very physical, which means you're drilling exercises in your daily routine. As a brass player, I run more or less the same set of warmups, range builders and flexibility exercises every day. Drummers do rudiments. String players have their own shtick.
As far as listening to music, I don't typically put something on repeat unless I'm trying to transcribe it. But I'll listen to a song, and there's a chance it'll play on repeat in my head all day (or all week!). Steely Dan and LCD Soundsystem are particular earworms for me. It wasn't until college I realized this isn't true for many people.
LCD Soundsystem is great for this.
Beyond, or beneath, song structure, I've noticed that experienced songwriters repeat notes in their melodies more often than people starting out.
Knock knock
Who’s there?
Philip Glass
Knock knock
Who’s there?
Philip Glass
Knock knock
Who’s there?
Philip Glass
I was into his string quartets for a while about forty-five years ago but haven’t heard them since. Maybe it’s time to listen to them again.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Wse3ZoUXo5M
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=waQgZEGsUpw
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6njANe60Evw
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bi0JwXruBig
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2m4341zPZNY
I don’t remember much repetition from him either
I'd argue that the lack of repetition led to things being less memorable.
Yes, exactly ! That is why Elliott`s work sound like instruments talking to one another, like 4 instruments talking to each other with emotions & expressions each instrument having a specific character.
On the other hand generally we perceive some degree to repeatability as music.
Aha! So this is what the local classical radio station was playing during its avant garde sets.
Elliott Carter - String Quartet No. 1 is, I find, a deeply deeply irritating work, moreover its advocates are pretentious in the same vein that avant garde jazz muzos are, witness the comment, "Carter always wrote such visceral, intense music for strings. I suspect he really loved the physicality of string instruments." Yeah, right, sure. Call me a philistine, I don't care. Spare me.
Elliott Carter would strongly disagree. :)
A lot of Baroque music is through-composed. For instance, the Prelude and Fugue forms that J. S. Bach composed some of his music in don't contain outright repetition, or not very much. Themes recur, of course, but in different settings: differently harmonized, in different keys and so on. The two-part form features repetition that may be omitted: while it's common to perform AABB, it can just be AAB, or AB. Sometimes there is a slightly alternative ending in B for when it is followed by A again. The Rondeau form has explicit repetition: AA BA CA ... XA.
I think, you will be hard-pressed to find two identical bars in a Bach fugue, where all the voices are doing exactly the same thing that was heard before. Even if a recurring theme appears, it's in a different way. Blatant copy and pasting is basically anti-fugue. Fugue-fail.
I can’t say I do enjoy that music, to be honest. When I was in my late teens and early twenties—as I said, around forty-five years ago—I was attracted by the notion that some 20th century classical composers were breaking new ground, throwing off old-fashioned constraints, being revolutionary, etc. I had studied traditional music theory and learned to play Mozart, Haydn, Beethoven, etc. on the piano, and those more recent composers’ formal experimentations seemed exciting. My youthful rebellious infatuation with their music didn’t last long, and ever since I have listened to more conventional tonal music—not only Western classical but also rock, folk, jazz, reggae, etc.
I did get a bit more out of Elliott Carter when I was young, though, than I did out of other avant garde composers. Amid all the disorder there was something trippy and emotive about his music. These days, for a similar effect, I listen to Bach fugues, which have been mentioned by other commenters here. If anyone is interested, here’s an arrangement of the Art of Fugue that I listened to for the first time the other day and really liked:
https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=OLAK5uy_lRi9N_I7iJUGXi...
As of this writing, the musicians’ channel has all of 14 subscribers, including (just now) me.
I'll note that a pop music current that has, I think, even less repetition than someone like Coltrane was the Progressive Rock genre, especially the originals in the early 1970s. Bands like Yes, Genesis, King Crimson, Pink Floyd, Gentle Giant - they were all producing 10-20 minute songs that used repetition sparingly, instead of relying on a typical verse-chorus-verse structure. Not exclusively, mind, but each had quite a few, typically as centerpieces of their albums.
https://hakenmusic.com/
My entire late 80's high school days were pretty much just listening to Marillion over and over again until my Walkman would wear out the cassette and I'd have to get another copy. Just something about Fish's brooding bitter anger appealed to my angsty teenage mind. Once Fish left though, they quickly moved away from what I was interest in listening to.
These days the one prog album I seem to keep going back to is "Tales From the Lush Attic" by IQ, although "Relayer" by Yes has been getting some good play lately.
But: I recently started exploring what they've done in the decades hence, and I am gaining a new appreciation of Hogarth's vocal expression. I find the studio/album version of the song "When I Meet God" to be particularly haunting.
P.S. On Youtube there is a 2-person band named Fleesh that has done spectacular covers of songs like /SFaJT and /Season's End/. Highly recommended.
ETA: Oh my goodness, that lady in Fleesh has a beautiful voice. Their version of "Sugar Mice" is stunningly great.
"A love supreme" immediately sprang to mind.. I guess all that repetition worked.
I'm not a professional musician, but I've played and performed in different settings for about 15 years.
Until reading your comment, I didn't realize that many people don't get songs stuck in their head. I often get very long and complex songs stuck in my head for hours to days. Sometimes it's just portions, but sometimes it can be the full song.
I don't quite know how to describe my recollection of music, but it seems to be somewhat akin to eiditic memory, but for sounds. After looking into things, the term eichoic memory seems to come up, but I'm not sure it quite encapsulates what I'm trying to express.
Out of curiousity, do you have aphantasia? I do, and often wonder if the strength of my music recollection comes from a lack of visual recollection in my mind.
Sometimes it takes a few listens to fully memorize a song, but I can revisit music many years later and still have perfect recollection of the piece despite the complexity of the music I tend towards.
For example, my favorite band is Between the Buried and Me (a progressive metal band) and their compositions tend to use a ton of complex and mixed meter, as well as non-repetitive rhythmic patterns. Despite all that, I have perfect recollection of their music—even for songs over 17 minutes long.
Sorry for the long response—your comment just triggered some things I've been thinking about for a while and I wanted to process them and share.
I've considered cause/effect on this before and personally just decided it was probably coincidence combined with my poor visual memory making the other types seem that much more impressive. There's no particular compensatory mechanism I can think of that would explain remembering sound better because I remember vision worse.
Interestingly, I've never been any better at composition (i.e., imagining novel music) because of this. To the extent I've composed, I still pick stuff out a part at a time and figure out how it fits rather than starting with a finished sound in my head to recreate.
I view things like perfect pitch as distinct from a strong musical recollection. With effort, I can transcribe music and eventually learn it, but it's a separate skill in my mind.
The ability to "listen" to songs by recalling them is more what I was referring to when discussing my experiences. I'm with you on the non-existent ability to recall imagery.
I have no idea if there is some type of connection between the two, but it's interesting that at least two of us seem to have similar experiences!
Well, being weekday mid-day, the restaurant was nearly empty and there was some guy who sat there by himself for over two hours. I ended up taking some of my standards and doing what I could to stretch them out, playing lots of repeats, doing extended improvs over the changes. I turned Herbie Hancock’s “Chameleon” which I normally did as about a 4–5 minute piece following the structure of the Maynard Ferguson version which was the basis for the charts that I originally learned the song from into a 10 minute piece with extended improvs and some bonus repeats. “Night Train” turned into another 10-minute number. And this guy just did not leave. Finally, when I was almost out of material, he got up, dropped a twenty¹ in my tip jar and headed out.
⸻
1. I also got paid by the restaurant, but as I recall, he was the only customer out of the single-digit number of diners in the restaurant who left a tip.
https://youtube.com/playlist?list=PL52RKVKBFM328OwddSMRQS9BY...
Though after 3 or 4 times I usually switch it up. I do like albums..
Or sometimes one song can last like 30 minutes. (Phish does this). It’s great to drive/work to because it does have a rhythm that moves.
https://youtu.be/UuzclQBJwWs
https://youtu.be/UbkqE4fpvdI
We have more material now than we could ever get through in several lifetimes.
No more than once a day per tune, please.
It depends.
Sometimes I'm doing "critical listening" and I'll repeat the same song many times carefully examining the interplay between instruments, vocals, effects, rhythms, whatever - and intentionally re listening to it over and over so I can concentrate on one specific interplay each time through.
Sometimes I'm just drowning out next doors power tools of vacuum cleaner, and one song on repeat is just as good as a playlist.
But I grew up in the golden era of albums, and I love to listen to a whole album in the order the artist carefully curated them into. I _can't_ listen to a single song off Dark Side Of The Moon, I need to hear the entire album end to end. (And I will stab anyone who plays the songs out of order - let that be a warning to any Spotify engineers or product managers I ever meet...)
Even my own playlists (of electronic music, which doesn’t tend to be released as albums) very quickly attain a ‘canonical’ order to my own ear. It’s jarring when the anticipation of the next track is disrupted.
My quirk is deep dives. I'll discover a new band or style to me, then listen to as much of it as I can. Very often someone's whole catalogue at a time.
I'll occasionally repeat an album many times - recent examples are both Pixvae's albums or Ott's new album Heads (after 8 years waiting)!
Now despite access to all the music in the world, I still have per-project playlists. So I might listen to the same ten songs again and again for weeks on end, as starting the soundtrack quickly puts me in the mood to resume work where I last left off.
I've also adopted a mild superstition that it's bad to listen to the soundtrack for a project that failed.
Even provided it wasn't normal, how any person engages with art is up to them and it doesn't require someone else's approval. No need for your tastes to be normal.
And as Nabokov used to point out, a good reader, that is an active and creative reader is a rereader. Same goes for music. Many incredibly talented people spend their entire lives studying and playing a handful or maybe only even one composer, so why shouldn't listeners do the same.
Mentally separating out the different voices in the composition, listening for how they enter and exit the soundstage, how that layering of sound builds up the texture of the music, not to mention melody, harmony, dynamics, pacing, phrasing, repetition, structure, timbre, rhythm, and the interplay of all these factors.
I wonder if there is something to it or if it's just one of those oft repeated 'facts' that run by themselves after a while?
There is a TON of mis-information and "I have condition x and behavior Y" correlation/causation BS on TikTok. There's articles of people developing "tik tok tourettes syndrome" from watching videos of other with Tourettes. There's a growing literature of the affects of follow-along mental health conditions coming from watching other people on media with certain issues. I've seen a ton of TikTok ADHD claims that are BS or are "normal" but people shared as ADHD symptoms. I don't know how, but I suspect this sort of mis-information is bad for society.
That said, I'm not a doctor/psych but I think its true that this is also an ADHD behavior. The article talks about how the author will listen to certain songs forever, but I think the ADHD behavior is a binge-and-forget type behavior, which seems different, and more related to the hyper-focus aspect of ADHD.
Source: I have adhd, do this with music, and recreationally learn about ADHD for fun.
I kind of wonder if it's a symptom of something but am otherwise more or less 100% neurotypical so I think it's just a weird quirk.
I've had this happen with various Ace Attorney soundtracks[1]. The best bit of advice I found to beat the earworm was to play the song to the end in my head. Which didn't help a bit, because every song on those soundtracks has a loop point.
[1]: example here https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=e-QiKy-iEkQ
I worked at a gym, and to this day, there are songs I don't even like that pop up in my head. 3 years of hearing them every day just about drove me spare.
I personally tend to listen to full albums repetitively. Lately it has been Billy Cobham’s Spectrum and some Khruangbin albums. I also play drums and tend to study the same handful of songs for a few months at a time. Ok maybe I’ve been meditating on Stevie Wonder’s Superstition for over a year haha.
Do you use stimulants of any kind? I have a pet theory that even high doses of caffeine can lead to earworms or IMI. I think there’s even OTC medicines that are well known to contribute to earworms.
The song? A stupid commercial jingle. "Meow meow meow meow..."
I think I was under a lot of stress then — I have worked on a team or two where the project (and management) were stressful. So likely that is it.
(Also a tell: I began to notice my handwriting when I signed checks was deteriorating to something scrawly, uncontrolled — when I switched teams and made other changes in my life to reduce stress I found my signature return to the more graceful strokes I was used to.)
Musically, there is (still) often a song stuck in my head. But I put music on in the background nearly every day, seems to keep the song in my head moving along to something new....
The stress relationship may have something to do with it though. The times where it happened the most are pretty strongly correlated with high periods of stress in my life as well.
It often happens for words that I realized I was pronouncing wrong from only having read them and never having heard them. For example, sepulcher and dais come to mind as words that I repeated internally with no control for days on end and they're both words that I was mispronouncing until I heard them while reading and listening to an audiobook at the same time.
Interesting little quirk of the mind I suppose.
One fix I’ve found that often works for me is listening to instrumental jazz every night before bed. It’s variable/random enough that it knocks the stuck song out of my mind without replacing it with another. Search for “jazz for sleep” playlists, there are a few decent ones out there.
Hits on the key point, in my opinion. Repeating songs, phrases, rhythms can by hypnotic and put the listener/performer into a trance-like state. Something that can be quite enjoyable and even addictive.
I find that listening to music with lyrics simply won't do it for me. It must be instrumental only. Something like Keith Jarrett, Earthless or a good Frank Zappa vamp. Time no longer has meaning. It's wonderful!
What should be very catchy music is now a fatiguing wall of noise that you just don't want assaulting your eardrums any more.
Makes me think of Oasis records from the early 90s that were mastered to be the loudest sounding songs on the pub jukebox, and they were, then.
I have 45s from the '80s whose sound quality utterly destroys all-digital masters from the last decade. And that's not a digital-vs.-analog thing; I can make MP3s out of those 45s that will still destroy "lossless" versions of the same song on Apple Music.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SbyZDq76T74
Now we got an extended club version MeowMixTape, on Youtube, for kids!
It must be a challenge or something.
https://yewtu.be/watch?v=rp8fYbrWLKg