We have a habit of being mindful of the songs you hear over the loudspeaker of a store while driving down a street, your friend hums all the time at school, or the songs you come across while browsing social media.
You also know that when these songs are stuck in your mind, they continue to play in your head until you are fed up with them. So why? Today, we will talk about the last example of the songs you hear on social media that get stuck in your mind and drive you crazy. But not just any social media, TikTok. What is the reason why the songs we hear on TikTok are so stuck in our minds?
Why do you remember the songs on TikTok?
According to a 2011 study by Finnish researcher Lassi A. Liikkanen, 90% of people have a song on their minds at least once a week. Researchers from Dartmouth College have even discovered that the vocal cortex in your brain is activated when you actually listen to the song rather than imagine it.
Callula Killingly, a mind song researcher at Queensland University of Technology, says: “TikTok songs are definitely more mind-blowing than others. That’s because leaving a task unfinished causes a sense of tension, which That’s why you feel psychologically compelled to finish it. That’s why your mind struggles to complete this task.”
So the reason why a 15-second segment of a song doesn’t leave you alone is because your brain thinks it’s unfinished. But song duration isn’t the only possible explanation for this situation. Repetition is also an important element when it comes to mind-blowing songs. When you go to TikTok’s ‘For You’ page, you can hear the same song over and over in different short videos. “Hearing the same tune over and over on TikTok can definitely get you stuck,” Killingly says.
Songwriters and composers are struggling to create songs that pop into your head
Simple songs are more likely to trend on TikTok. Especially for the last 10 years, songwriters and composers have been trying to create the kind of music that catches the mind of the listener.
This is the reason why a 15-second song fragment lingers in our minds all day. Speaking on the Switched on Pop podcast, Charlie Harding and Nate Sloan say that almost all of today’s pop songs are written with a stanza-chord-continent-chord scheme, and are usually composed on a 4-chord scheme.
As listeners are distracted between different apps, platforms and formats, singers now have less time to grab attention. For this reason, apart from the harmony of chords and words, the song has a fun melody that lasts for a maximum of 7-10 seconds and is constantly repeated. Let’s take Billie Eilish’s song Bad Guy as an example.
A prime example was ElyOtto’s SugarCrash, a song that went viral on TikTok almost instantly in August. The song is just over a minute long. It’s obvious from everywhere that the song was written for TikTok.
Harding and Sloan now have dynamics such as lowering-rising-lowering of the song due to the fact that the songs are too short and even shorter now. They talked about the fact that it wasn’t and it was just fast paced.
Researchers from Baylor University discovered that although the brain does not work actively after we sleep, it continues to process the music in our minds for 15 seconds, and therefore our sleep quality deteriorates. For this reason, browsing social media before going to sleep can affect your sleep very badly, don’t do it.
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