I have no musical ability or training (in fact I can’t sing for my life) but the quality of the music in my head is quite good. The lyrics always go with the song if the song has lyrics, but they are sounds. If I do not know all of the lyrics than I can’t make them out, but I hear them. I rarely get just the lyrics stuck in my head, that usually only happens if I’ve been dwelling on them. But I once got a particularly annoying phenomenon, I had the lyrics to a song stuck in my head during a dream. I had the sensation of them repeating endlessly in the dream and then I woke up with them stuck (They were “After the dream of falling and calling your name out, these are the roots of rhythm and the roots of rhythm remain”)
I also have gotten games stuck in my head, but that feels like a much different phenomenon. It only happens if I play something too much, and generally then if it has a repetitive visual interface. It’s always simple games like Tetris or Snood. I often don’t mind playing them in my head, but it gets annoying when you try to sleep and you realize you’re playing Tetris. I know this happens to a lot of people I know, it seems a common problem if you overplay those games.
I’m not a musical expert, but here’s a few guesses.
In the case of “It’s a Small World” and “This Is the Song That Has No End,” the melodies begin on beat 4 and 3-1/2 respectively, with a 1-beat note on the first beat of the next measure. The leading notes of each melody pull you into the following measure and the continuation of the song.
Another method shows up at the beginning of Beethoven’s 6th Symphony. The first few phrases end on the dominant harmony (C major), which pushes you back to the tonic (F major).
Also, in Perpetuum Mobile op. 257, an unending piece by Johann Strauss, the harmony continually alternates between tonic and dominant (or a 7th harmony, maybe). Again each phrase ends on the dominant, pushing you back to the tonic.
Once the chorus I was in was practicing the hunters’ chorus from Der Freischutz. It has 3 or 4 verses which dovetail into each other like “It’s a Small World.” It ran through my head for weeks!
The songs that get stuck in my head are like dreams…they stay for a bit and if they’re particularly annoying I will tell someone about them.
When I’m almost but not quite asleep, or maybe in the first stages of sleep, I hear CD-quality music. However, when I wake up I don’t remember what I was “listening” to the night before.
Re: Tetris.
You know those bathroom floors with little tiny square tiles? Using the facilities is pure hell after a marathon Tetris game. And I occasionally go on crossword binges that make the same thing happen, only I try to fit letters into the squares.
I recall reading about children in the 19th century who had to work as much as 12 hours a day 6 days a week in factories and mines. Sometimes the children would wake up in the middle of the night to find that their hands were unconsciously and automatically going through the motions that they would make to run the factory machines they worked at. Scary.
i completely understand the mining thing…although it may sound rediculous, when i was in high school i was in marching band/color guard and if i happened to hear the song we were marching to at some obscure time, i would unconciously start doing the flag/rifle/sabre movements with my hands and start marching in place…
just to throw this in, the one song i find worst to have in your head is the one that goes “the cat came back the very next day…” i can’t remember the rest.
After a weekend-long 40-hour “Diablo II” marathon, my wife and I found ourselves unconsciously making mouse-clicking motions and looking around for zombies and ghouls in the underground parking garage, while I had the Tragically Hip’s “Toronto #4” running through my head. Okay, so I’m off-topic.
More and more, it’s sounding like the speech centers aren’t involved in the actual replay–they seem to act (if you’ll pardon the expression) in concert with it, instead.
You raised some interesting points about elements that might make particular bits of music stick, zgystardst. If you’re not a musical expert, you’re a pretty good substitute; I had to dig way back in my college memories to follow some of it.
A nontechnical summary might be (please correct me if I’m wrong): Music sometimes get stuck because of a compulsion to seek closure. A segment that sounds incomplete is as frustrating as only hearing part of an interesting conversation. If a segment that runs through your head seems incomplete, you tend to add another segment in hopes of completing it. If you can’t remember any more of the song, you, or if the song ends in a lead-on segment, you get as much of the song as you can remember looping. This may explain why simply listening to the song all the way through sometimes clears up the jam (sorry again).
As for the repetitive motions that several people have mentioned, those seem to be extreme cases of the kinesthetic (movement sensation) memories I mentioned earlier. I sometimes find myself doing the slide-positioning or fingering for a song that I know well when I hear it (on the stereo or in my head).
ok, but what about the songs you don’t ever remember hearing in the first place, but seem to know the words to? and they constantly run around your head too.
I can’t really distinguish these. My memory is generally pretty good, but sometimes it does strange things, like filing off all references to where I learned something. It’s not at all unusual for me to know lyrics without any recollection of hearing the song, or extensive quotes without any memory of seeing the movie. This seems like a different, but related memory quirk. Have you noticed a tendency for this to happen more often with lyrics that don’t form complete sentences, or that are very repetitious?
BTW, welcome aboard!
thanks…i actually find that the most common ones of no definite origin are songs that are harmonic, weather it be instrumental or not…if it has harmony i remember more…if that made any sense
wacky ninja:
“And the cat came back
The very next day.
The cat came back
They thought was a goner,
But the came back
He just couldn’t stay awwwwwaaaaay.”
Looks like our music teachers had the same song book. That was about 4th grade, along with a song called “Dona.” I only remember the chorus and that it made me cry, as it was about death of some sort.
I have a ridiculous music memory. I remember the theme song to Jem and the Holograms, which was on when I was in the third grade. My father is a diehard Bob Dylan fan, and I will hear a Dylan cover, and recognize it as such only because I already know the words. It’s actually a bit frightening, knowing the words to a song you have long since forgotten.
But usually, I get a whole song stuck in my head. Music, all instrumental parts, all vocal parts. I have (supposedly, I was tested a long time ago) perfect pitch, and so I assume my mental music is fairly accurate.
Based on my scant knowledge of neurology, I know that different sections of the temporal lobe “hear” and process different sounds, additionally, the temporal lobe is (I think. I could be way wrong,) where long term memory is stored. Therefore, it makes sense that there is a strong correlation between music recognition and memory/recall. I’ll do some reading tonight and get back to yall tomarrow on the neurology.
Thanks, Swiddles!
My own research has turned up some evidence that lyrics are processed separately from tunes in the brain–there’s a summary at http://www.musica.uci.edu/mrn/V6I1W99.html#W99BN
Wacky Ninja, I’m still trying to figure out how harmony might fit into this. Are you especially fond of music that relies heavily on harmonization, e.g. Gregorian chants?
Oh, thank God, I’m not the only one! 
Tetris is just about the only game I can play with any skill at all, and I often find myself with the game stuck in my head, just like a song.
Yes, you’re trying to fall asleep, but your brain is off playing Tetris!
As for songs…I usually get the Disney or Nickelodeon stuff stuck in my head. With 3 kids, it’s pretty easy to be singing the “Blue’s Clue’s” song all freaking day. With that one, you can even fit words to match what you’re doing. “We are gonna make dinner, we are gonna make dinner, we are gonna make dinner, cause it’s really fun!” It definately has that march cadence someone mentioned.
I often find myself humming the Rugrats theme or maybe something from the soundtrack of “The Lion King.”
Very annoying.
OK, here’s a weird one. I have a pretty good mental jukebox and can frequently “recall” songs to play in my head.
Sometimes I forget the lyrics to a song, and so I can recall the song and it plays in my head, and then I can just listen to it until the lyric I’ve forgotten is sung and then keep track of that or write it down or whatever.
Oddly, I can’t fast-forward to the part of the song with the forgotten lyric, I just have to let it play in my head.
Seems to me like the speech/word centers of the brain must be different from the music/singing ones…
actually yes, i am quite fond of song with harmony–like Queens The Prophet Song, or mozarts requiem…stuff like that…and then there are your usual teeny bopper songs you just can’t forget no matter how hard you try…
swimming riddles, i remember those same cartoon theme songs…i get funny looks for knowing them, aparently they think i am crazy–or i watched too much TV
Cartoon themes do tend to stick. My niece finds it hilarious that the Sailor Moon and Powerpuff Girls themes get stuck in my head so much–she sings them at me just to watch the despairing look on my face when one of them sticks. Of course, I do the same to her when she’s trying to memorize her music for band.
Wacky, it sounds like your tendency to get heavily harmonic stuff stuck might be a result of your taste in music–if you tend to listen to more of one type of music, it might be more likely to get stuck. From my reading, it seems that procedural learning works better for musical memory–you would probably remember the types of songs that you tend to sing along with (even subvocally) more readily than other types. In other words, peoples’ brains rewire themselves to work best with the type of music they prefer. Research indicates that this happens as people learn tonality–that’s why the pentatonic music common in the Orient sounds somewhat odd to those of us raised in an Occidental musical environment, and vice versa.
I’d say you’re definitely right. People who have strokes that take out their expressive speech (Broca’s aphasia) are still able to sing, and vice versa. Dr. Harold Klawans wrote (in either Toscanini’s Fumble or Newton’s Madness) about a young woman who woke up one day unable to play her oboe. She had no other symptoms, but could not play a note. He traced the problem back to a small, unnoticed stroke that destroyed her music center in her brain (birth control pills - do not take them if you are susceptible to strokes.)
I do remember reading once about a woman who was in a really bad car accident. When she awoke in the the hospital, she could only speak russian and knew how to do other things she never knew before. As she slowly recuperated from teh accident she forgot russian and the other stuff and started speaking english again. She had no idea where the russian came from.