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July 10, 2009
Private Earworm
After Sandy, my songwriting partner, heard the music I had written for our new song, she told me that I had given her an “earworm.” She found herself singing the chorus in her mind over and over again.
For those of you not familiar with the term “earworm,” I refer you to a section from a blog entry of mine from the distant past, January of 2006:
(Now the scene begins to shimmer and dissolve...you have to imagine me reading this with some reverb on my voice...)
There is always music running through my mind.
Sometimes I will purposefully run a favorite song through my head, from start to finish. It’s a little like having a jukebox in my mind.
But while some times I choose the song that plays internally, other days I wake up with a song seemingly chosen for me.
The “chosen” song plays incessantly, and I don’t seem to have any control over it. Then the thought pattern breaks up a little, and I’m left with a song fragment continually running through my inner ear.
I have an “earworm” - a piece of music I can’t seem to get out of my mind.
(Now we're back in the present...)
Sometimes your earworm may consist of a popular song, a big hit. So its conceivable that thousands, maybe millions of people have experienced the same earworm at some time. Maybe even all at once if they saw the song performed on Letterman or O'Brien (I almost wrote Letterman or Leno! How times have changed...)
But what Sandy had was a “private earworm.” After she told me about it, I started running the chorus of our song through my mind as well. Now we were sharing our private earworm. We were the only two people in the entire world with that particular song running through our minds.
Naturally, we hope to change that!
Posted by leonolguin at July 10, 2009 08:54 AM