Involuntary musical imagery as a component of ordinary music cognition: A review of empirical evidence

Involuntary musical imagery (INMI) refers to a conscious mental experience of music that occurs without deliberate efforts to initiate or sustain it. This experience often consists of the repetition of a short fragment of a melody, colloquially called an “earworm.” Here, we present the first comprehensive, qualitative review of published empirical research on INMI to date. We performed an extensive literature search and discovered, in total, 47 studies from 33 peer-reviewed articles that met the inclusion criteria for the review. In analyzing the content of these studies, we identified four major research themes, which concern the phenomenology, dynamics, individual differences, and musical features of INMI. The findings answer many questions of scientific interest—for instance, what is typical in terms of INMI frequency, duration, and content; which factors influence INMI onset; and whether demographic and personality factors can explain individual differences in susceptibility and responses to INMI. This review showcases INMI as a well-established phenomenon in light of a substantial body of empirical studies that have accumulated consistent results. Although the populations under study show an unfavorable bias towards Western, educated participants, the evidence depicts INMI as a universal psychological phenomenon, the possible function of which we do not yet fully understand. The concluding section introduces several suggestions for future research to expand on the topic

Catching earworms on Twitter: Using big data to study involuntary imagery.

In recent years, so-called big data research has become a hot topic in the social sciences. This paper explores the possibilities of big data-based research within the field of music psychology. We illustrate one methodological approach by studying involuntary musical imagery, or earworms in the social networking service Twitter. Our goal was to collect a large naturalistic and culturally diverse database of discussions and to classify the encountered expressions. We describe our method and present results from automatic data classification and sentiment analyses. Over six months, we collected over 80,000 tweets from 173 locations around the world to obtain the most diverse dataset collated to date related to involuntary musical imagery. Automated classifications categorized 51% of all tweets gathered, with over 90% accuracy in each category. The most prominent categories of discussion concerned reporting earworm experiences, hyperlinks to music, spreading general information about the phenomenon, and communicating thankfulness (sincerely or ironically) about receiving earworms. Sentiment analysis revealed a balance towards negative emotional expressions in comparison to reference data. This is the first study to show this negative appraisal tendency and to demonstrate the ‘earworm’ phenomenon on a global scale. We discuss our findings in relation to previous literature and highlight the opportunities and challenges of big data research

Sticky tunes: How do people react to involuntary musical imagery?

The vast majority of people experience involuntary musical imagery (INMI) or ‘earworms’; perceptions of spontaneous, repetitive musical sound in the absence of an external source. The majority of INMI episodes are not bothersome, while some cause disruption ranging from distraction to anxiety and distress. To date, little is known about how the majority of people react to INMI, in particular whether evaluation of the experience impacts on chosen response behaviours or if attempts at controlling INMI are successful or not. The present study classified 1046 reports of how people react to INMI episodes. Two laboratories in Finland and the UK conducted an identical qualitative analysis protocol on reports of INMI reactions and derived visual descriptive models of the outcomes using grounded theory techniques. Combined analysis carried out across the two studies confirmed that many INMI episodes were considered neutral or pleasant, with passive acceptance and enjoyment being among the most popular response behaviours. A significant number of people, however, reported on attempts to cope with unwanted INMI. The most popular and effective behaviours in response to INMI were seeking out the tune in question, and musical or verbal distraction. The outcomes of this study contribute to our understanding of the aetiology of INMI, in particular within the framework of memory theory, and present testable hypotheses for future research on successful INMI coping strategies

Systematic Integration of Solution Elements: How Does Digital Creativity Support Change Group Dynamics?

Part 1: Long and Short PapersInternational audienceIn practice, most creativity techniques are still performed with traditional tools, such as pen and paper, whiteboards, and flipcharts. When transforming these techniques into a digital environment, the reduction of organizational overhead is the main goal to foster accessibility. Still, we do not know if overhead reduction fosters creativity or if it eliminates an important part of the creative process. To get a deeper understanding of these effects, we compare the performance of the creativity technique SIS (Systematic Integration of Solution Elements) in a traditional setting with a setup based on multiple interactive surfaces. By using a mix of diverse evaluation methods, we show how the use of a digital interactive creativity room can really foster creativity and produce better results