She’s got you high and you don’t even know yet
She’s got you high and you don’t even know yet
The sun’s in the sky, it’s warming up your bare legs
You can’t deny your looking for the sunset
Why, when there are hundreds of thousands of songs released each year, do we choose to listen to the same ones over and over? The reason may be rooted in science.
I have a problem. I absolutely rinse songs that I like. In my defense, you most likely do it too. You’ll know what it’s like if so: you start off not even realizing how many times you’ve hit replay; you’ll get the song stuck in your head, and decide that the only way to make it stop replaying in your mind is to repeatedly blast it out of headphones until you’re completely sick of it. I tend to get a song stuck in my head, mentally play around with its different parts, and then feel an irresistible urge to pick those layers apart again and again. And again.
“Musical repetition gets us mentally imagining or singing through the bit we expect to come next,” professor Elizabeth Margulis, author of the recent On Repeat: How Music Plays the Mind, noted in an interview with Mic. “A sense of shared subjectivity with the music can arise. In descriptions of their most intense experiences of music, people often talk about a sense that the boundary between the music and themselves has dissolved.”
You play songs on repeat, then, because it feels as if you’re singing them. It’s that sense of anticipation that happens in the listener, what Margulis calls “virtual participation.” It’s similar to participation in something that follows a narrative structure, like reading a book or watching a movie over again. It’s similar to as if you were creating the music with your mind — as if it were a part of you.
To some extent, that relies on something known to scientists as the mere exposure effect. The principle is simple: We like things just because we’ve heard them again and again. That same principle is behind the music industry’s ability to brainwash listeners into liking songs simply by buying up radio plays.
Ultimately, it seems that playing a song obsessively is at the heart of how music becomes a part of you. That’s because repetition allows us new ways of listening — ultimately making us feel more connected to the music.
References:
https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC4723199/
https://www.mic.com/articles/99744/the-science-behind-why-you-listen-to-your-favorite-songs-obsessively
http://changingminds.org/explanations/theories/mere_exposure.htm
https://www.vice.com/en/article/pa3qez/neuroscience-brain-replaying-same-song-reward-centre
https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/10.1177/0305735613482024