Dangerous Posts #1 ~Ohrwurms
We're probably all familiar with the phenomenon wherein a song, and usually a totally annoying one at that, gets stuck in your head, playing over and over forcing rational thought, sleep and eventually everything else from your brain (see the scene in Touching The Void for an example; a mountain climber- close to death, with, to add insult to actual injury, Brown Girl In The Ring blaring inside his head driving him crazy). I was intrigued to learn that there's an actual coined expression for this phenomenon, a loan translation these are called, where there exists in one country's language an expressions for these abstract occurrences. For example- and I can't remember the actual terms here- there's the French one, translated as The Spirit of The Staircase where what you should have said in a given situation occurs to you much later when it's too late to be of any use. Or the German expression, which translates to "Spiteful Glee", describing the pleasure to be had by someone else's ill fortune. I learned fairly recently that this annoying phenomenon of getting a song stuck in your head is actually called an Ohrwurm in German, translated to English as Ear Worm. I also found out that it can be a fairly common occurrence, particularly for the elderly, where the song actually stays there and just doesn't go away. It's so common, apparently, that there's an Actual Top Ten of these Ear Worms that people (pensioners mostly) have playing in their heads 24/7! (Yup, a Top Ten, with, wait for it, Yes, We Have No Bananas at the top spot!) I've also a friend who's Gran has the theme from Dad's Army in constant rotation on her internal jukebox.
I'm guessing that the dread Earworm didn't exist until possibly the advent of mass media, or at least radio- when before this time would you have had the chance to repeatedly hear the same old dross over and over ad nauseam?
And lets not even get started here on another abhorrent modern malaise, the "Amusing Ringtone"- one of my favourite oxymorons. But we'll save Crazy Frog and his satanic ilk for later, shall we?
Good.
Of course, dear reader, the main reason that this can be labelled a Dangerous Post is that I've found out from enquiring of this phenomenon that you can open a Pandora's box by even mentioning Ohrwurms. It's a kind of Trojan Horse wherein even the very act of discussing this wormy beast can bring on an attack. All I do know for sure is that I'm experiencing this annoying event a hell of a lot more than I ever used to. Last night, for example, it was the Ramones I Wanna Be Sedated; strangely fitting, but luckily fairly bearable for once.
Which brings me happily to a more positive thought, and it is this- Maybe having a constant Ohrwurm wouldn't be that bad (hear me out here) - I mean if you really had to have one song/riff playing constantly in your head for the rest of your life over and over and over and over again as an infernal internal sound-track.
Okay, off the top of my head, the best I could hope for would maybe be the keyboard/bass run in Light My Fire that Manzarek used to play for what felt like hours on end when The Doors were doing one of their "pregnant pause" bits, you know- just before Morrison did that scream of his. Or maybe just the bass line to Stagger Lee by Nick cave & The Bad Seeds would be endurable. I've got the feeling that these riffs in particular would conceivably make you feel a bit more cock-sure, assured- give you a much needed swagger possibly missing from your otherwise hum-drum life if you had them as a perpetual inner sound-track.
And it would certainly save on all those AAA's for your IPod!
Notes:
The term earworm is the literal English translation of the German word ohrwurm (see the earliest citation, below, for more). An earworm is also sometimes called a sticky tune or a cognitive itch. In Portuguese they callit chiclete de ouvido, or ear chewing gum.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Earworm
earworm (EER.wurm) n. A song or tune that repeats over and over inside aperson's head. Also: ear-worm, ear worm.
Earliest citation:
"If a meme is a cluster of semantic symbols that propagates through a human population in a social manner - similar to the way a gene is a combination of biochemical symbols that propagates through a human population in agenetic manner - a sudden, wildly popular, new addition to "the hit parade" can be seen as a kind of meme. When the medium of radio and the recording industry that grew up alongside it created a system for propagating musical themes through a population, a new phenomenon became possible - the"overnight hit." The idea of a "hit" isn't untranslatable, since most cultures have a word for the winner of a competition. But the idea of a tune, a melody, a combination of musical sounds that seems to be on everybody's lips at the same time, that spreads through a society as rapidly as a respiratory infection, and seems to invasively seize and occupy space in peoples minds until they finally succeed in forgetting it, merits a word of its own...
(This) experience reflects a phenomenon shared by the vast majority of people, according to an on going study at the University of Cincinnati. Nearly everybody has been mentally tortured at one point in their lives by an"earworm" - a tune that keeps repeating itself over and over in their heads.The research also indicates that people who get the most earworms tend to listen to music frequently and have neurotic habits, such as biting pencils or tapping fingers."
-Hieu Tran Phan, "'Sticky tune' hits a chord with many," The Press-Enterprise, March 4, 2003
" The Germans use the word Ohrwurm (rhymes with "door worm," where the "w" is pronounced like a "v") to denote these cognitively infectious musical agents. Whenever somebody complains to you that he just can't keep the latest pop tune from running through his head, tell him he can dispel it by calling it by name and by thinking about the original German meaning, which captures some of the mnemonicalli parasitical connotations of the word, for Ohrwurm literally means "ear worm" and is also used to refer to a kind of worm that can crawl into the ear."
-Howard Rheingold, "Untranslatable words," The Whole Earth Review, December22, 1987
I'm guessing that the dread Earworm didn't exist until possibly the advent of mass media, or at least radio- when before this time would you have had the chance to repeatedly hear the same old dross over and over ad nauseam?
And lets not even get started here on another abhorrent modern malaise, the "Amusing Ringtone"- one of my favourite oxymorons. But we'll save Crazy Frog and his satanic ilk for later, shall we?
Good.
Of course, dear reader, the main reason that this can be labelled a Dangerous Post is that I've found out from enquiring of this phenomenon that you can open a Pandora's box by even mentioning Ohrwurms. It's a kind of Trojan Horse wherein even the very act of discussing this wormy beast can bring on an attack. All I do know for sure is that I'm experiencing this annoying event a hell of a lot more than I ever used to. Last night, for example, it was the Ramones I Wanna Be Sedated; strangely fitting, but luckily fairly bearable for once.
Which brings me happily to a more positive thought, and it is this- Maybe having a constant Ohrwurm wouldn't be that bad (hear me out here) - I mean if you really had to have one song/riff playing constantly in your head for the rest of your life over and over and over and over again as an infernal internal sound-track.
Okay, off the top of my head, the best I could hope for would maybe be the keyboard/bass run in Light My Fire that Manzarek used to play for what felt like hours on end when The Doors were doing one of their "pregnant pause" bits, you know- just before Morrison did that scream of his. Or maybe just the bass line to Stagger Lee by Nick cave & The Bad Seeds would be endurable. I've got the feeling that these riffs in particular would conceivably make you feel a bit more cock-sure, assured- give you a much needed swagger possibly missing from your otherwise hum-drum life if you had them as a perpetual inner sound-track.
And it would certainly save on all those AAA's for your IPod!
Notes:
The term earworm is the literal English translation of the German word ohrwurm (see the earliest citation, below, for more). An earworm is also sometimes called a sticky tune or a cognitive itch. In Portuguese they callit chiclete de ouvido, or ear chewing gum.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Earworm
earworm (EER.wurm) n. A song or tune that repeats over and over inside aperson's head. Also: ear-worm, ear worm.
Earliest citation:
"If a meme is a cluster of semantic symbols that propagates through a human population in a social manner - similar to the way a gene is a combination of biochemical symbols that propagates through a human population in agenetic manner - a sudden, wildly popular, new addition to "the hit parade" can be seen as a kind of meme. When the medium of radio and the recording industry that grew up alongside it created a system for propagating musical themes through a population, a new phenomenon became possible - the"overnight hit." The idea of a "hit" isn't untranslatable, since most cultures have a word for the winner of a competition. But the idea of a tune, a melody, a combination of musical sounds that seems to be on everybody's lips at the same time, that spreads through a society as rapidly as a respiratory infection, and seems to invasively seize and occupy space in peoples minds until they finally succeed in forgetting it, merits a word of its own...
(This) experience reflects a phenomenon shared by the vast majority of people, according to an on going study at the University of Cincinnati. Nearly everybody has been mentally tortured at one point in their lives by an"earworm" - a tune that keeps repeating itself over and over in their heads.The research also indicates that people who get the most earworms tend to listen to music frequently and have neurotic habits, such as biting pencils or tapping fingers."
-Hieu Tran Phan, "'Sticky tune' hits a chord with many," The Press-Enterprise, March 4, 2003
" The Germans use the word Ohrwurm (rhymes with "door worm," where the "w" is pronounced like a "v") to denote these cognitively infectious musical agents. Whenever somebody complains to you that he just can't keep the latest pop tune from running through his head, tell him he can dispel it by calling it by name and by thinking about the original German meaning, which captures some of the mnemonicalli parasitical connotations of the word, for Ohrwurm literally means "ear worm" and is also used to refer to a kind of worm that can crawl into the ear."
-Howard Rheingold, "Untranslatable words," The Whole Earth Review, December22, 1987
posted by Alias at 2:58 PM
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