Earworms, music, and the mind

Music is a universal feature of human experience, some form of music is found in all cultures and Darwin even speculated that language and music might have common evolutionary foundations. A frequently experienced - but little-researched - aspect of music is the "earworm", the song that becomes stuck in one's head. In this talk Philip Beaman, Professor of Experimental Psychology at Reading University will discuss how music is represented in the mind/brain, and give an historical background on documented experiences of earworms (or "stuck songs") before presenting some more recent results suggesting why earworms might happen, and what we can do about them.

Image: AI-generated image created with assistance from ChatGPT