Why We Enjoy Hearing a Song Repeated

How often does the chorus of your favorite song repeat? How frequently have you heard the chorus? Repetition in music is a universal phenomenon and isn't just a characteristic of Western pop songs. Why? Elizabeth Hellmuth Margulis went into great detail with her research about the "exposure effect" and how recurrence encourages us to interact with music as active participants rather than passive listeners.

Popular songs throughout the world frequently include repetitive choruses. Repetition is a characteristic of music from many different cultures. So why does repetition play such a big role in music? A portion of the solution is due to the mere-exposure effect, according to psychologists.

Simply put, people tend to favor things they have already experienced. For instance, we may hear a song on the radio that we don't particularly enjoy, but we then hear it again on the street corner, in the movie theater, and in the grocery store. We'll soon be singing along, tapping our feet to the beat, and even downloading the music. This mere-exposure effect is not limited to music. It also applies to forms and Super Bowl advertisements. Why is repetition so common in music specifically? Psychologists invited listeners to musical compositions that avoided exact duplication in order to conduct their investigation.

They listened to snippets of these works, either in their original versions or in ones that had been digitally edited to add repetition. People rated the repetitive versions as more enjoyable, more interesting, and more likely to have been composed by a human artist, even though the original versions were created by some of the most renowned composers of the 20th century and the repetitive versions were put together by brute force audio editing. Repetition in music is incredibly fascinating. Consider the iconic Muppets song "Mahna Mahna." If you've heard it before, it's nearly impossible for you to refrain from saying "Do doo do do do" after I sing "Mahna Mahna."

Each musical piece is inextricably linked to the one that comes after it through repetition. Consequently, you may immediately anticipate what will happen after hearing just a few notes. You may start humming aloud without realizing it since your mind is instinctively singing along. According to recent studies, listeners are more inclined to move or tap along when a musical passage is repeated.

Repetition enables us to participate in the music rather than just listen passively. Additionally, studies have revealed that when listening to musical repeats, listeners change their emphasis from listen to listen, focusing on various facets of the sound. When a phrase is repeated, your focus is on the guitarist's use of pitch bends rather than the melody it initially contained.

Through a process known as semantic satiation, this also happens in language. A word like "atlas" can be repeated so many times that you cease considering its meaning and instead concentrate on how strangely the "L" follows the "T." In this manner, repetition can unlock audio realms that are otherwise inaccessible. Although the "L" after the "T" may not be visually significant to "Atlas," the guitarist's pitch bending may be crucial to the song's emotive intent. The speech-to-song illusion illustrates how repeatedly repeating a sentence causes listeners to focus on the pitch and temporal characteristics of the sound, which makes the repeatedly repeated spoken words appear to be being sung. Random sound patterns have a similar impact.

People will consider random sequences that have been played repeatedly on loop to be more musical than sequences that have only been played once. Repeated sounds cause us to listen in a way that we associate with music, where we actively engage our imaginations with the note that is about to be played. This listening style is related to the way that certain musical passages can become "earworms," where they play over and over in our heads like they're stuck on repeat. Although repetition is a crucial element of what defines music as an experience in our minds, critics frequently criticize repetition in music as being juvenile or retrograde.