The science of music: Why your brain gets hooked on hit songs | Derek Thompson | Big Think

The science of music: Why your brain gets hooked on hit songs
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There's a reason you can't stop your head boppin' to block-rockin' beats, and why you can't get a catchy song's hook out of your head. The Atlantic editor Derek Thompson lays down a spoken-word jam about the science behind music's appeal. Derek Thompson's latest book is Hit Makers: The Science of Popularity in an Age of Distraction.
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DEREK THOMPSON:

Derek Thompson is a senior editor at The Atlantic magazine, where he writes about economics and the media. He is a regular contributor to NPR's Here and Now and appears frequently on television, including CBS and MSNBC. He was named to both Inc. magazine's and Forbes's 30 Under 30 lists. He lives in New York City.
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TRANSCRIPT:

Derek Thompson: One of the questions that I set out to answer in the book is, why do we like what we like in music? What makes music catchy? Where do “earworms” come from?

And to answer this really complex question I started with the simplest possible question, which is: what is music? Why does the brain process some sounds as cacophony and other sounds very clearly as song?

And to start to answer this question you have to go to Diana Deutsch. And she is a musicologist at the University of California San Diego. And Diana was listening to herself talk at her house one evening, and she put a sentence of hers on repeat and she realized if you take a bit of speech stream and you take a sliver of it and you start repeating it again, start repeating it again, start repeating it again, start repeating it again, start repeat –obviously you can sort of hear it if you’re listening that the brain suddenly starts to hear a melody in this repetition, and a rhythm and a beat, and it starts to hear that which was formally just speech as song.

And so what she would say, what I would say, is that repetition is the God-particle of music, it is the thing that distinguishes the cacophony of the world from that which we cannot help but recognize as music.

So that’s interesting, but it’s not an answer to the fundamental question, which is: what makes music catchy? Because if I go into a music studio and I say, “start repeating it again, start repeating it again” I’ll be laughed out of the studio immediately. So there has to be a repetition and variety. What is the scientific way to think about the balance?

And to answer that question you have to fly northeast from San Diego to Ohio State University in Columbus Ohio, where David Huron did this famous study involving mice where he played a note for a mouse, let’s call it a B note. And the mouse would turn its head like this. And he would play B again, and the mouse would turn its head. And he would play B-B-B and the mouse’s head is just doing this thing.

And eventually the mouse habituates, it learns to ignore the stimulus. And habituation is common in culture and life. We learn to ignore things that are too familiar.

But if instead at the very moment the mouse is about to habituate from the B note he instead plays a C note, the mouse attends to the C note and is dishabituated from the B note. So now he can go back to scaring the mouse with the B note.

And it turns out that if you want to scare a mouse for the longest period of time with the fewest number of notes there’s a very specific pattern that you play, and it goes: B-B-C-B-C-D note to habituate from both from the B and the C note.

And as I was reading this study and talking to David I thought, well if you take the letter “B” and you replace it with the word “verse” and you take the letter “C” and you replace it with the word “chorus “and you take the letter “D” and you replace it with the word “bridge,” you have the following song structure: verse-verse-chorus-verse-chorus-bridge, which is essentially the most common pop song structure of the 20th century.

So what seemed so fundamentally interesting to me about this idea is that this same formulaic relationship between repetition and variety that can scare a mouse in a laboratory setting also makes us attend to Top 40 radio in cars.

But throughout the book I’m constantly thinking about what are the most important implications of each of these ideas, not only for entertainment, which is interesting but maybe not important, but also for something like politics?

And it’s interesting when thinking about repetition and speech and persuasiveness, and realizing that every great rhetorical device is essentially a form of...

[lasse]

Most common structure though, afaik, is

Verse - Pre-chorus - Chorus - Verse - Pre-chorus - Chorus - Bridge - Chorus

[daniel]

Familiarity is key aswell. If someone only ever listened to rap for their whole life, if they suddenly listen to a piece of Beethoven, they might hate it (with exceptions). But if they listened to it over and over and over again, they would probably enjoy it. Music taste is simply what music we are familiar with and what are brains consider to be ' normal '

[TheDenoginator]

I think what a lot of people might be missing about this video is that it is an introduction to a concept...

[eointolster]

"Hit" songs are played times a day, that is why they are in my head. I refuse to allow others to play radio stations in the office due to the mental abuse being shot out over the airways

[kyraocity]

0:10 what makes music catchy
0:42 Diana Deutsch Sometimes Behaves So Strangely
1:10 Repitition is god particle of music
1:24 Repetition + Variety MAYA
1:55 Habituation — learn to ignore things that are too familiar
2:20 scare a mouse pattern BBCBCD = Verse Chorus Bridge VVCVCB
3:07 Top 40 in cars
3:24 implication is interesting but not important (I decline. It’s how misogyny gets a pass in Hiphop)
4:09 antimetabole ABBA
4:56 turns human speech processed into song by the brain

[MauriceMossisitnot]

This is why I love Once in a Lifetime, that 'Same as it ever was' repeated phrase is pure genius!

[alex-erde]

0:47
Like a vocal sample in hip-hop. All makes sense.

[naz]

this video is excellent. Finally, someone breaking things down and trying to make empirical observations about how the phenomenon of a "hit" works. Very eye-opening. The Patterns all resemble each other too, antimetabole is a fractal of the popular song structure, which is a macro version of the formula for the succession of notes that bugs mice for the longest period of time. Very cool observation of this pattern.

[lilyzemengist]

This is THE best Big Think videos I've seen in a long while. I understand completely know why we are naturally drawn to hit songs.

[cocainaforall]

🎼 Start

🎵 Repeating it again 🎶

🎼 Start

🎵 Repeating it again 🎶

👏👏👏👏👏

[e.k.]

that was the most intereseting thing i've seen on bigthink recently

[mambowman]

Repeated exposure to a melody will result in a listener "warming" to almost any song.that's how payola got started.

[AFRoSHEENTARCMICHAEL]

Repetition is to rhythm as rhythm is to time. Time brings order out of chaos and without Time all you have is chaos. The real question is what is musical harmony. Consonants.

[workingguy]

Great episode - thank you for the insight, and for keeping it short.

[JulianMather]

I wonder is there a difference between those who are musically inclined and those who are more comfortable with spoken word? I do not have a musical bone in my body. Can't dance. Can't​ sing. Can't clap a beat. But I can hear patterns in speech. I've always been able to. Over the past decade, I've acted on this hunch and now speak professionally. I use these concepts spoken of in this video to great effect. I'm really interested in this discussion.

[satirical]

Wow. I had to watch this for music theory class, and this man is ON to something

[wingnutmcspazatron]

Right now I got "Look what the cat dragged in" by Poison stuck in my head.

[Cabooseable]

My hope is someone samples "Start repeating it again, start repeating it again" and just have it on repeat through the whole song, and send it to him 🤭

[ctpdpwn]

Interesting video but some of this is a bit of a stretch and as a musician I don't ever remember hearing that song structure at 2:57 that supposedly is so common. A bridge is usually well...a bridge between two parts of a song, it almost by definition is not the very last part of a song. If it were it would be called an outro instead

[deborahpilchard]

This video is great and I would love to use it in my middle school music classroom but can't all because of the videos advertised right at the end. Please consider that for future videos.