I’ve heard that other people have them. I’ve never had the experience that I can identify.
Do I occasionally spontaneously think of a tune & mentally hum a few bars? Sure. Does it play unbidden in my head after that once? No.
I also occasionally have spontaneous memories of movies, bits of dialog, books I’ve read, SDMB posts I’ve read or made, jokes I’ve heard or told, or places I’ve been. So I can’t say the music recollection is any different from any other memory.
I get them all the time. Probably the most interesting one I’ve ever gotten was in high school, when a friend and I were on a whale-watching/fishing trip. I had just gotten to the point where I wasn’t feeling seasick anymore, standing around watching them gut the caught fish, when suddenly a perfect version of Ricky Nelson’s “Garden Party” started playing in my head. Not like a regular earworm, but like I literally had a radio playing in my head. It was kind of cool (and no, there was no radio on the boat).
Never happened since, though. Just normal regular earworms.
Do you happen to be a musician? What atonal pieces do you remember having as earworms? And when you say “purely melodic”, do you mean “primarily melodic, but with a harmonic background”, or indeed thoroughly monophonic?
Atonal pieces that I often hear in my head include Neil Young’s Arc, Lou Reed’s Metal Machine Music, Null’s Sonicfuck U.S.A., literally hundreds of Jandek songs, also Bartòk, Schoenberg, Varese, Stravinsky, etc. In a lot of ways it’s not surprising, since I’ve listened to all of it dozens or hundreds of times and I know that it’s firmly locked into my memory.
And yeah, I meant “purely melodic” but I also hear earworms that fit the other descriptors you mention.
Basically anything that could be considered a song or tune or even just a riff can be an earworm for me.
This morning I simultaneously had Bottom’s Got Meth. going in my head with the guitar part from a Jucifer song inexplicably laid over it. Eventually the Jucifer song faded away, but frankly, I’m still listening to Bottom in my head, even as I have tunes playing on shuffle on my iTunes.
My totally unscientific theory is that my hippocampus and my auditory cortex are very interconnected and this somehow bleeds over into me experiencing constant earworms.
And yes, I am a musician, although I was not always. The earworms were there long before I began singing in my high school choir or picked up a saxophone in college. I’ve always heard music in my head all the time.
I don’t understand this use of “normal regular earworms”.
What I hear in my head is exactly like I have a stereo playing all the time, usually at a very VERY low volume, not a faint echo of the real thing. I take that is different from what you normally experience, but how?
Here’s a great example of how it works with me. All day, at least five times per hour, I have sung “and every day the paper boy brings more…” and that’s it.That’s all that comes to my head. I know the words to the song, but that’s what pops up over and over. Yesterday early on I heard Manic Monday for the first time in years and all day I kept hearing “kissin’ Valentino
by a crystal blue Italian stream” all freakin day and I’d probably STILL be singing it if Pink Floyd hadn’t slipped in.
Yes, I am highly susceptible to “obsessive” thought patterns. Not only bits of music, but words or phrases, ideas, sudden desires (“I really would like a bag of Fritos right now!”) and so on. An hour is about normal for these, and they are annoying as hell.
My mother also suffered. I could just murmur the phrase, “Ravel’s Bolero” and she had it in her head the whole rest of the day.
A friend of mine recommends “Mars, Bringer of War” from Holst’s “The Planets” as an antidote. It’s so insistent, it drives away all other musical sequences, but is so difficult to maintain that, when it has cleared the field, it can be dismissed readily.
(The “Darth Vader” march from Empire Strikes Back is sufficiently similar to serve the same role.)