The World of INMI research
Involuntary musical imagery (Sacks, 2007), or INMI (Liikkanen, 2008), refers to the phenomenon of hearing some piece of music repeatedly in one's mind. Sometimes this feature is called earworms, persistent or spontaneous musical imagery, haunting melodies, brainworms, musical mind-pops, stuck tunes, intrusive music, or stuck tune syndrome. The term musical image repetition (MIR) has also been suggested by Bennett, 2003, but it is not preferred here because of the overlap with an established acronym for music information retrieval. This page attempts to link together all researchers and resources around the subject.
Scientific events
The world's first scientific gathering of researchers interesting in INMI took place in Summer 2012, 26th of July. During the joint 12th International Conference on Music Perception and Cognition (ICMPC) and 8th Triennial Conference of the European Society for the Cognitive Sciences of Music (ESCOM). ICMPC-ESCOM 2012 conferences is organized in Thessaloniki, Greece in July 23-28. More information about the INMI symposium available on
the symposium website (http://icmpc12earworms.com/)
Researchers and agendas
Below you will find the people involved, together with their publications related to INMI. The work's that directly INMI have been included in the order of each author's first relevant works' publication (books, theses, journal articles, conference presentations). The year 'since' indicates when the first publication by the author was released.
Theodor Reik (1888-1969), since 1953
Reik's book called The Haunting Melodyis likely the first psychological (and psychoanalytic) study on the subject. See my commentary on his book.
Publications:
Reik, T. The Haunting Melody: Psychoanalytic Experiences in Life and Music. Farrar, Straus and Young, New York, 1953.
Francis Joseph Leach, since 1982
Composer Leach has been interested in INMI in the service of creating novel compositions.
James J. Kellaris, since 2001
Professor of marketing psychology at the College of Business, University of Cincinnati (US). He currently maintains a website called Earworms Research which provides his own results in a layman accessible form.
Publications:
Kellaris, J. J. (2001). Identifying properties of tunes that get stuck in your head: Toward a theory of cognitive itch. Paper presented at the Society for Consumer Psychology Conference, Scottsdale, AZ, American Psychological Society.
Kellaris, J. J. (2003). Dissecting earworms: Further evidence on the song-stuck-in-your-head phenomenon. Paper presented at the Proceedings of Society for Consumer Psychology, New Orleans, LA, American Psychological Society.
Sean Bennet, since 2003
Sean Bennett was a PhD student at Cambridge (musicology) and coined MIR in his Master's thesis.
Publications:
Bennett, S. (2003). Song stuck in your thoughts? Profiling musical imagery repetition (MIR). Paper presented at the Society for Music Perception and Cognition Conference 2003, University of Nevada, USA.
Bennett, S. (2003) Musical image repetition. Unpublished Master's thesis, Harvard University
Freya Bailes, since 2004
PhD Freya Bailes works at University of West Sydney (AU) and has written her doctoral dissertation (musicology) on musical imagery and has published the first reviewed journal papers about INMI.
Publications:
Bailes, F. (2004) A sampling study of the prevalence and nature of 'tune on the brain' phenomena, in 8th International Conference on Music Perception & Cognition.
Bailes, F. A. (2006). The use of experience-sampling methods to monitor musical imagery in everyday life. Musicae Scientiae, 10(2), 173-190.
Bailes, F. (2007) The Prevalence and Nature of Imagined Music in the Everyday Lives of Music Students. Psychology of Music 35(4).
Lia Kvavilashvili, since 2004
Lia Kvavilashvili works at University of Hertfordshire (UK) in the School of Psychology and did her PhD in the topic of involuntary semantic memories.
David Kraemer, since 2005
A doctoral student of Cognitive neurocience at Dartmouth College (New Hampshire, US) published a brain imaging study of musical imagery in which he claimed to have tapped INMI in action.
Steven Brown, since 2006
Steven Brown is, according to his own webpage, 'a cognitive neuroscientist working in the Department of Psychology at Simon Fraser University in Burnaby (Vancouver), British Columbia' (Canada). He talks about the phenomenon under the topic of 'perpetual music track' describing in detail his experiences with music that is always present in his consciousness. The paper referenced below is likely to most insightful and detailed presentation of the topic published this far.
Publications
Brown, S. (2006). The perpetual music track: The phenomenon of constant musical imagery. Journal of Consciousness Studies 13: 25-44. PDF provided by the author
John W. Mowitt , since 2007
John W. Mowitt, professor of cultural studies at the University of Minnesota, has recently written about INMI building upon the work of Theoder Reik.
Publications:
Mowitt, J.W. (2007) Tune stuck in head. Parallax, 12(Oct 4), 12-25.
Oliver Sacks, since 2007
Oliver Sacks, one of the most succesful authors in popularizing neurological and psychological science, released a new book about music phenomona and brain in October 2007. Althought the section devoted to involuntary imagery is fairly short and provides no really comprehensive data on the matter, it very nicely integrates observations and ideas from several authors. See Sack's review on Wired regarding the book and his interview in YouTube regarding 'brainworms' (note that the interview is misleading with regards to other types of involuntary memory).
Publications:
Sacks, O (2007) Musicophilia: Tales of music and the brain. Alfred A. Knopf, New York
Lassi A. Liikkanen, since 2008
Researcher at Aalto University and University of Helsinki, the the author of this page. I carried out a large study over the Internet in 2007 related to INMI, which has been now reported at two international music research conference, 10th International Conference of Music Perception and Cognition and 7th Triennial Conference of European Society for the Cognitive Sciences of Music ESCOM 2009. The extended and thoroughly revised versions of these papers have since been accepted for publication at Psychology of Music and Musicae Scientae, respectively.
Publications:
Liikkanen L. (2012) From characterization to understanding involuntary musical imagery. In the Proc. of ICMPC-ESCOM 2012. July 23-28, Thessaloniki, Greece.
This paper describes how involuntary music phenomena can influence our social life. They show people's awareness of contagion - the possibility to 'pass on' the earworm or promote involuntary music experiences in other people. The other part relates to unintentional overt musical behavior. Lot of people responding to my survey described experiences in which they had received unwanted social attention by unintended musical
Liikkanen, L. A. (2012). Musical activities predispose to involuntary musical imagery. Psychology of Music, 40(2) 236-256.
DOI
Liikkanen, L.A. (2012). Inducing involuntary musical imagery: an experimental study. Musicae Scientiae 16(2) 217 217-234
DOI
Jan Hemming, since 2008
Dr. Jan Hemming from University of Kassel (Germany) released his first results on a study of phenomenology of INMI in 2008. On the following year he published a peer-reviewed chapter in a German music psychology yearbook describing the same findings in depth.
Hemming, J. (2009). Zur Phänomenologie des 'Ohrwurms' in W. Auhagen, C. Bullerjahn & H. Höge (Eds.) Musikpsychologie - Musikalisches Gedächtnis und musikalisches Lernen. Jahrbuch 20, pp. 184-207. Göttingen: Hogrefe.
Imants Baruss and Mike Wammes, since 2009
Professor Baruss and researcher Wammes both work at the Department of Psychology, King's University College at The University of Western Ontario (Canada). They have recently continued the work of Steven Brown on perpetual musical track and qualitatitively studied the components of this consciouss experience in a larger sample of people.
Andréane McNally-Gagnon, since 2009
Andreane is a PhD student working at the University of Montreal.
Philip Beaman and Tim Williams, since 2010
Dr. Philip Beaman from University of Reading (UK) together with clinical psychologists Tim Williams published in early 2010 a paper about the recurrence of INMI experiences and attempts to control this phenomenon.
Andrea Halpern, since 2011
Professor of Psychology at Bucknell University, Andrea Halpern and James C. Bartlett from University of Texas published a paper consisting of two diary studies about INMI in 2011.
Victoria 'Vicky' J. Williamson, since 2012
Williamson is a post-doctoral researcher at Goldsmiths, University of London. She works with reader Lauren Stewart and Dr. Daniel Müllensiefen to supervise several research efforts on INMI. She pioneered a survey study on earworms with the help of BBC.
Publications:
Williamson V. J., Jilka S.R., Fry J., Finkel S., Müllensiefen D., Stewart L. (2012). How do “earworms” start? Classifying the everyday circumstances of Involuntary Musical Imagery. Psychology of Music May 2012 vol. 40 no. 3 259-284.
You can find a number of papers by her students from proceedings of ICMPC-ESCOM 2012, to be listed here
Ira Hyman, since 2013
Professor of Psychology at Western Washington University , Hyman and a group of six graduates studies what they labeled intrusive music. They brought in a new aspect to study Zeigarnik effect in relation to INMI.
Publications:
Ira E. Hyman Jr., Naomi K. Burland,
Hollyann M. Duskin, Megan C. Cook, Christina M. Roy, Jessie C. McGrath, Rebecca F. Roundhill (2012, advance online publication) Going Gaga: Investigating, Creating, and Manipulating the Song Stuck in My Head. Applied Cognitive Psychology
Wiley Online
doi: 10.1002/acp.2897
Closely related research
In my opinion, two most closely related lines of research lines are those of musical imagery and involuntary memories. The prominent researchers in each field include Andrea Halpern (imagery) and Dorthe Berntsen (involuntary memory). There is a specific line of research concerning involuntary semantic memories that touches the essence of INMI initiated by a publication by Kvavilashvili and Mandler (article about involuntary semantic memories published in Cognitive Psychology, 2004).
Kvavilashvili has sinced continued the work on involuntary semantic memories, or mind pops, and collaborated with Hertfordshire researchers Ia Elua and Keith R. Laws to release a paper in Psychiatry Research, 192 (2-3), 165-1709. This paper compares normal people with age-matched schizophrenics and depression patients. It finds that schizophrenics have more frequent mind pops than the normal or the depressed.
After the end of 1990's, cognitive neuroscience has achieved the status of state-of-the-art psychology . Important contributions, also relevant to INMI have been made especially by a group of scientists located in Montreal (QU, Canada), led by Robert Zatorre. Outside the works of Zatorre, Peretz et alia, I would like to highlight a study by Goycoolea et al. (2007, Musical brains: a study of spontaneous and evoked musical sensations without external auditory stimuli, Acta Oto-Laryngologica 127: 711-721). These researchers located in Santiago (Chile) talk about INMI and present empirical results about deliberate musical imagery acquired with SPECT. Their work falls under the category of medicine and psychiatry, with the focus on false perceptions, or auditory hallucinations (also called hallucinosis, pseudo-hallucinations, or auditory Charles Bonnet syndrome). In clinical psychology, the term musical obsessions has also been used.
In 2011, PhD student Angelica B. Ortiz de Gortari and her co-authors published a paper about Game transfer phenomena in video game playing in the International Journal of Cyber Behavior, Psychology and Learning. This work not only mentions earworms induced by games, but also discusses interesting involuntary transfer phenomenon from (excessive) game exposure to conscious experience outside the game environment.
Earworms in popular media
INMI is nowadays well represented in the popular media. Possibly the first appearance was made in Mark Twain's short story 'A literary nightmare', also known as 'Punch, Brothers, Punch.' It was published in 1876 and introduced a poem or a rhythmic jingle which created an awfully persistent and attention disabling condition for the Twain brothers. The jingle itself, essential part of the story, was work of a number of people, excluding Twain (see Wikipedia).
Miscellanous resources
News and blog entries in the web:
- Dean Kahn: WWU researcher: Songs stuck in your head not always music to your ears. The Bellingham Herald.
- 2012 Dec 14. Thomas van Dijk, De muzikale macht over het geheugen. De Standaard. (Belgium newspaper)
- 2012 Jun 19, MSNBC Body Odd: Why you can't get 'Call Me Maybe' out of your head by Meghan Holohan
- 2011 Nov 14, MSNBC Body Odd: 4 reasons a song gets stuck in your head By Cari Nierenberg
- 2012, May 23 Scientific American on Kvavilashvili's mind-pop research
- 2011, Nov 11 Scientific American on Ear worms research (misspelled)
- 2009 Dec 11, ScienceLife blog on Beaman's and William's paper
- 2007, Sep 09 The Situationist interviews David Levition on the subject(uninformative)
- 2006 Jun 22, Vadim Pokhorov's article on Guardian Unlimited
- 2003, Nature Neurosciences news item from 2003 regarding Kellaris' work.
More permanent site:
- Goldsmiths' Earworm project, Music, Mind and Brain group
- Wikipedia: Involuntary memory
- Wikipedia article about Earworms
- Exploratorium (Sciences museum in San Francisco, US) has adopted the earworms story with some additional flavours.
- EarwormsLearning.com presents a commercial solution that is claimed to be built-on the MIR phenomenon
Discussion forums
There are plenty of threads concerning stuck tunes going on in different forums, the following have a bit more scientific content than the others.
- Daniel J. Levitin's 'Your Brain on Music' book's own forum . The book itself also boasts with an earworm explanation, but addresses it only in a single chapter without any references.
- Bearcastle Blog entry on Earworm word's ethymology contains interesting discussion on the topic
Musical examples of INMI 'abuse'
Annoying tune
Kummeli: Tää biisi jää soimaan sun päähän (FI)
Allekirjoittaunut: Tosi tarttuva täytebiisi (FI
In other langauges
In German: Ohrwurm
In Finnish: Korvamato
YLE news: Korvamatoja 2010 euroviisuissa
Related content:
Liikkanen and Gomez Gomez (2013) Experience of Time in HCI. CHI 2013 workshop paper, 2013/04/23
Liikkanen L. (2012) From characterization to understanding involuntary musical imagery. In the Proc. of ICMPC-ESCOM 2012. July 23-28, Thessaloniki, Greece., 2012/07/25
Liikkanen L. (2012) From characterization to understanding involuntary musical imagery. In the Proc. of ICMPC-ESCOM 2012. July 23-28, Thessaloniki, Greece., 2012/07/25
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