Do you have someone you spend a lot of time with who plays a song to death, on repeat, for weeks at a time until you hate it? And, subsequently, them? Are you that person?
Do you listen in moderation? Are you a responsible listener?
I'm in a relationship with a with a repeat offender, who will kill a track that I had turned him onto — the sick bastard. Rather than attack this person until they can't press play ever again, I approached an esteemed list of kindly scientists, doctors, professors and the like to answer explain this potentially dangerous behaviour in order to better understand it.
Little did I know that within 48 hours I would be listening to
"Paint" by Roxette, a song I'd never heard, by an 80's duo I never liked, at least fifty times back to back. Mercifully, rather than throw myself off the balcony, I had some science to make sense of it.
Thank you, science community!
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Why do some people listen to a favourite song repeatedly, ad nauseum, whereas others pace out the experience so as not to get sick of it?
Dr Daniel Müllensiefen - Dept of Psychology, Goldsmiths College, London:
I'm not aware of any specific research on that question. People use music differently for a million reasons and the repeat frequency with which a particular person chooses songs probably follows a
negative exponential or
Zipf distribution.
It would be interesting to know whether people who tend to choose a small number of songs very frequently also show similar choice behaviour in other domains, e.g. food, drink, or entertainment choice. Maybe this choice behaviour is related to the personality dimension 'openness to experience' that is part of most big 5 personality models. Let me know if you discover real research around this questions.
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My boyfriend will play a song to death, on repeat, quickly. Is that a form of masturbation?
Adrian North - Deputy Head of School/Director of Psychology Programme, Heriot-Watt University, Edinburgh:
Haha! Well, because I value my job I won't comment on that specifically but...
Didn't Berlyne have a theory? This is a purely scientific enquiry.
Absolutely, of course. What we know is that if you look across repeated hearings of a piece of music, as time goes on, because it becomes easier to predict, it becomes less arousing to you as an individual. Each time you hear it, it's less surprising so it gives you less of a jolt. First of all you get this thing where you're learning the music and, as with most things, as you know more about it you understand it more and you like it more. Then you reach this tipping point where you flip over the curve and it just becomes boring.
A lot of people argue that perhaps that explains why we like a piece of music and then it gets boring and then plain irritating, because we're learning it. What that also means is that when music becomes more complicated it takes more and more listens to get a handle on it. Which explains, in part, why the classical music charts move slower than pop music charts. I'm not saying that the music is better, but it's undeniably more complex.
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Why do some people binge on a song while others enjoy it in moderation?
Dr Alexandra Lamont - Senior Lecturer in Psychology of Music, Keele University, UK:
We have done some research on this, actually (Lamont & Webb, 2010 -
'What makes a favourite piece of music?' -
Psychology of Music journal) and some more to follow in a forthcoming book called
Music and Familiarity (King & Prior / Ashgate). Theories of experimental aesthetics predict that preference for music follows an inverted U-shaped curve over time. So something novel is not much liked, liking rises as exposure/familiarity increases (and subjective complexity reduces), up to a maxima and then declines when we are over-exposed to something.
This suggests a rather simple situation where over-listening just results in eventual decline in preference. And when you look at elements like the pop charts this is exactly what happens - pieces are played on the radio, repeatedly, rising through the charts and then staying there for usually limited period of time before dropping off. Often never to return (or if they do, only at points of social relevance, such as the recent resurgence in popularity of recently departed Amy Winehouse).
However, as is usually the case, our real-life responses to music are much more complicated. The top of the curve comes at different points from person to person for piece to piece. We often come back to our own music after periods of time of not playing it, and of course we never just listen to one piece of music at a time. But listeners are aware of the need to avoid reaching saturation point with their own music collections and they often regulate their own listening over months and years to avoid this or deliberately return to music after a break period (which again can be months or years).
In the published paper we tracked people's listening over fairly short time periods of up to a month, finding that most people circulated their music listening habits to some degree. However, we uncovered two different types of listener behaviour: "magpies" tended to go more with the music in front of them, going through periods of a few days of repeating the same tracks or albums and then refreshing their collections. "Squirrels", on the other hand, had a bigger back catalogue of music to choose from and listened to music currently popular/familiar as well as tracks from their own past.
In the book chapter we also include some work by a former PhD student of mine, Alinka Greasley, looking at the way people talk about their music collections over much longer time periods. The same patterns of waxing and waning in terms of listening behaviour are found, and what we call "more engaged" music listeners are very consciously aware of the way this waxing and waning of preference works and regulate their behaviour accordingly. "Less engaged" listeners (who have less music, are more influenced by friends and have less conscious awareness) still behave in the same way, making sure they don't get too familiar with any of their favourite pieces of music, but are just a little less conscious of the behaviour and why they do it.
We could say the squirrels are more likely to be more conscious of the need to regulate, while magpies have the regulation done for them by things like the charts. In our admittedly small scale study there were no female squirrels, so there may be something in the collector's mentality which is more likely to be male (in some of our other work we often find men talking about the need to "complete" their music collections); however, repeated listening isn't something that is gender-specific, and I would argue that it's actually necessary in order to develop a familiarity with, liking for and understanding of music.
This is particularly marked when we're getting to know a new musical style or genre, but it applies equally to new pieces within a familiar idiom. Last night I went to a concert as part of a music festival in France. The complicated and brilliant Poulenc cello sonata left me unmoved, while the piece I enjoyed the most was Bach's third solo cello suite - not necessarily the most technically brilliant performance, not necessarily emotionally suited to a packed chapel on a warm summer's night in the midst of vineyards, but it was the only piece on the programme that I had heard many times before.
So the boyfriend is an extreme magpie?
As for your boyfriend, yes, I'd say he probably is an extreme magpie. The notion of subjective complexity is of course very individual, but he's going through repeat listening in a way that means he doesn't reach the peak of the curve by the time you do (which is why you find it annoying!). We had one person like this in our original sample but after 3.5 weeks of listening to one track she got bored and moved on to something else, so there is light at the end of the tunnel!
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Jason Jirí Musil - Music, Mind and Brain MSc course, Goldsmiths:
I am also the kind of person who listens obsessively to tunes, sometimes the same tune several dozen times a day. All of the below is VERY speculative - it's just one of those questions that I don't think anybody's really addressed properly. If anybody has conducted a survey of repetitive listening behaviour, then the following certainly doesn't stem from that study, as I'm not aware of it! So proceed with caution...
One plausible mechanism could be that the songs 'intrude'. I won't dwell too long on the topic of
earworms - they're covered better
here. Suffice it to say that
earworms are very common, and a common response to earworms is to go and play the song that's been running through your mind. This could account for some of the behaviour. As far as I know, the latest round of earworm research is still ongoing, but we will soon have clues as to what makes certain people more susceptible.
Another possibility comes from the study of individual differences. Music is a very exciting, salient and highly structured stimulus for the brain. Listening to pleasurable music induces neurochemical changes modulated by the
mesolimbic system in the brain, consistent with physiological experiences of reward (Menon and Levitin, 2005). Listening to the most pleasurable and emotionally salient music has a similar effect on the networks of brain regions responsible for reward and motivation behaviours, such as sex, food and recreational drugs (Blood and Zatorre, 2001).
There may be a correlation between high scores in a measure called 'sensation seeking' and certain types of music (e.g. metal: Litle & Zuckerman, 1986; punk, reggae, metal: Weisskirch & Murphy, 2004). Sensation seekers use many kinds of stimulation to get their kicks, often repeatedly, so music would not be an exception.
On a similar note, it is a common idea in personality psychology (in the tradition of Hans Eysenck) that extroverts may require more stimulation to reach a target level of cortical arousal. Introverts, on the other hand, may be naturally over-stimulated from within so to speak - perhaps one listen is enough arousal for our prototypical introverts. Certainly, the introversion-extroversion dimension shows hereditary properties, so if it accounted at all for repeated listening behaviour, here would be a handy place to look for a genetic influence.
Additionally, the effect of music on the
dopaminergic system can help with emotional regulation (Levitin, 2006) and a correlation between certain personality variables (such as neuroticism, introversion and low conscientiousness) and increased use of music for emotional regulation (Chamorro-Premuzic & Furnham, 2010) may tentatively suggest that music is indeed an important emotional regulator for many people. If you find a song that keeps your head level and focused, or energises you when you lose motivation, you may repeatedly 'self-administer' it to help you keep it together. I know that I certainly do.
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Andy R