Have you ever misheard song lyrics, but still can’t seem to get the correct lyrics right? Its a pretty strange phenomenon isn’t it? Even though we know what the song actually says, we can’t help but only hear the silly phrase we thought it once was. This, unfortunately, happened to me with Taylor Swift’s song, “Blank Space”. I know the lyrics are, “got a long list of ex lovers, they’ll tell you I’m insane,” but I can’t help but hear, “got along with Starbucks lovers, they’ll tell you I’m insane”. After embarrassingly messing up the lyrics countless times, I decided to do some research on why this problem occurs.
Apparently, the name for misheard song lyrics is called a mondegreen and yes, there is science behind this term. In a recent study, Claudia Beck allowed participants to interpret song lyrics that often contain mondegreens and analyzed what is going on when they misinterpret them. The study found that, “previous knowledge of the alternative percept had a strong impact on the strength of altered perception which is in line with frequent reports that these phenomena can have long-lasting effects”. Essentially, our prior knowledge and expectations influence the way we interpret things. So, sometimes your brain will try to switch the lyrics around to what is more relevant in your life or what makes the most sense to the mind.
But why would I hear “got along with Starbucks lovers” instead of “long list of ex lovers” if it depends on relevancy? I mean, it’s not like the word “Starbucks” is more relevant than the word “ex” in my head (or at least I would like to think so). Well, according to Kinja, “people, especially adult English learners, are desperately trying to regain the thread of meaning, and make order out of a chaos of sounds. Eventually they trick themselves into hearing something that the recognize, even if it doesn’t make sense”. So, it could also be that, due to the fact that those lyrics are spoken very quickly in the song, my brain could not make sense of it and quickly tried to replace the jumble with “Starbucks”.
Overall, it is nice to know I am not alone in this unfortunate situation. I am still curious as to why mondegreens have long-lasting effects on us. How can we overcome mondegreens? It is a question that I am assuming will be answered in the future, with more research done.
Resources:
http://io9.com/the-science-of-misheard-song-lyrics-1579968707
http://www.plosone.org/article/info%3Adoi%2F10.1371%2Fjournal.pone.0084667
This post made me laugh because just a few minutes ago my roommate and I were singing black space but could only remember one line! I never knew there was a term for this unfortunate and sometimes embarrassing phenomenon. I actually thought the song “Radioactive” by Imagine Dragons said “Ready to rock you”. Even though I know it says radioactive now, I still hear it as how I first interpreted it, which makes me think that mondegreens may never actually leave us. I agree that this could be in part to the way our brains have certain expectations of things and we interpret things by what we already know and what our brain recognizes. If it makes you feel better, you’re not the only one. Here is a funny video of the Top 10 Misheard Lyrics.
You are not alone! In the blank spaces song I always thought it was ” to all the lonely Starbucks lovers” So we had the same idea of what the lyric could be! Your post made me look further into the topic and I found an interesting article where Mark Liberman, a linguist at the University of Pennsylvania, said “there’s a piece of what we understand that comes from the expectations in our brain.” the article explains how we hear what we are used to and almost expect to hear come from the song. Here is the rest of the article:
http://www.pri.org/stories/2014-11-20/spread-mondegreens-should-have-ended-internet-it-hasnt
This post topic is very interesting. It made me think about how long these “mondegreens” last for in our minds. I found an article written by someone who experienced their own musical mix up and found their insight interesting as well, so I thought I would share…
http://www.physics.ohio-state.edu/~wilkins/writing/Resources/essays/mondegreens.html
I loved this post! I’m so guilty of always singing the wrong lyrics. I found it really interesting that this has been studied and there is science behind why it happens. I was curious about how the term “Mondegreen” came about so I did a little research and thought you’d find this interesting! http://www.uh.edu/~mbarber/mondegreens.html Overall, great job!