You are in the car, aux cord in hand, ready to exemplify all out millennial ignorance by rolling your windows down and blasting the latest Fetty Wap song. The beat drops, and you immediately belt out the lyrics with heartfelt exuberance and pride. Every lyric flows smoothly and naturally comes to ease while reiterating. As you arrive back home, you suddenly come to the realization that you have to memorize a list of inventors for your history class. Stammering and stuttering along the way, you struggle to memorize a simple list for class. but so easily were able to recite the lyrics in your car moments ago. Why does this frustratingly happen to so many us? The answer is simple: earworms, and the two p’s: pitch and practice.
Pitch:
Whether it be Lil Wayne’s high pitched raps, or Drake’s nonchalant flow over a steady beat, we more readily memorize those lyrics as opposed to a list of vocab words or a lecture from a professor. It should be said that pitch correlates with memory, but certainly doesn’t resemble the factor of causation. Pitch doesn’t directly result in mass memorization, and reversely memory doesn’t equate to pitch. A recent study concluded that infrequent pitches result in higher auditory cognition when compared to pitches of the same frequency. Essentially, those results provide a much more clearer understanding of why musical lyrics, rich in the plethora of auditory components, are much more easier to memorize than a monotone lecture that perpetually drags on.
Practice:
Practice? We’re talking about Practice?!
Repetition is the simple formula for how to adequately memorize anything, whether it be song lyrics or vocabulary words. Just simply asserting that repetition constitutes memorization is almost as weakly inferred as the class power points we studied on some of the early 20th century reports by tobacco companies that just because doctors smoked meant that it was good for you. If we like a song, chances are we’ll listen to it again and again, forcing our brains mechanisms to recall the information from a song to process cohesive thought. Therefore, if a song is constantly on repeat, the brain will retrieve any information associated with the song from our memory, which results in memorization. Recollection of information pertaining to a song equals memorization, and this time, those earworms as mentioned beforehand don’t make kids stupid.
I always wondered why it was so much easier for me to remember song lyrics than it was to remember things for my classes. It’s defiantly easier to remember a song when it has a catchy or perhaps even annoying beat. I find that alot of the songs that I sing in my head are songs that I do not like at all but they are always being played so I end up learning the lyrics unintentionally. When I was in middle school we had to learn the preamble but we learned it to a beat of song. To this day I can still resit the preamble because the song was catchy. If students were to pair catchy songs and facts they need to know from their classes into one, I am sure studying would be alot easier and they would probably do better on tests and quizzes because they are actually able to remember it.
Reading this article explains a lot of why I have the most random, nonsensical songs stuck in my head all the time. They are usually songs that I don’t even like but I use the excuse that they are very “catchy”. Music is such a huge part of our lives and we prefer to memorize song lyrics than the boring presentations our professors give us. Most of us prefer to jam out to some tunes than sit in class and listen to lectures. I guess it is a case of preference. Unique pitches from songs attract our attention a lot more. Even the overplayed terrible songs you hear on the radio will catch our attention. I also like the Iverson reference, coming from a Sixers fan!
This post really caught my attention, because I constantly have random songs stuck in my head…. whether it be the theme song to spongebob or a popular song that I heard on the radio. I did a little further research on the topic and found that according to LiveScience.com, there is a thing called an “earworm” sometimes known as a brainworm, which is a catchy piece of music that continually repeats through a person’s mind after it is no longer playing. Phrases used to describe an earworm include musical imagery repetition, involuntary musical imagery, and stuck song syndrome. A popular researcher who completed research at the University of Montreal stated that most people are doing something that is somewhat routine or mindless when an earworm strikes. “They might be doing household chores, taking a shower or waiting for a bus,” McNally-Gagnon said. “Their mind is not occupied by anything.” I find this whole concept beyond intriguing, and I must say that I’m happy “earworm” is just a term and not an actual worm. That would be very unsettling!!!
I find this very interesting. I’d like to think I have pretty good memorization skills, but when I memorize something for a test, I remember it for a shorter amount of time than I do music. Just extending your article a bit, I wonder if there is a connection there. Why do we remember song lyrics for longer periods of time as opposed to other material? Could it just be because of the singing itself? Take the ABC’s for example, we learn them through a song, but why does it work so well? I mean we haven’t forgotten them yet. This blog really got me thinking. Excellent topic, awesome points.
I found you’re blog really intriguing. If I could somehow turn all of the notes from my Econ class into a Fetty Wap song I’d have a guaranteed A. I looked into this aspect a little bit more and discovered that it was originally assumed that people only kept a representative memory of a song in their head. But according to McNally-Gagnon’s research “songs, like visual memories, are absolute, meaning that the brain holds all of the details of the song’s notes and phrasing”.
It’s pretty cool that our brains are so easily able to retain this kind of information. Maybe someone could come up with a way to apply this to school work and help us all get A’s.
It’s very interesting as to humans can do this. Give us something academic related to memorize and struggle to put it into our brains but as soon as that throwback song comes on the radio it is as if that song started playing last week. The words to the single are just there, in our brains. I think it’s crazy how that works and how it’s so easy for us to memorize songs. I think the tempo and beat of the song generally make it easier in our brains for us to memorize. I’ve learned this and have used it as a beneficial studying habit as I made little songs to the material I had to memorize in my classes. I find this very interesting how this works.