User:Js134/Earworm

An earworm, sometimes referred to as a brainworm, sticky music, stuck song syndrome, or, most commonly after earworms, Involuntary Musical Imagery (INMI),   is a catchy and/or memorable piece of music or saying that continuously occupies a person's mind even after it is no longer being played or spoken about. Involuntary musical imagery as a label is not solely restricted to earworms, musical hallucinations also fall into this category, although they are not the same thing. Earworms are considered to be a common type of involuntary cognition. Some of the phrases often used to describe earworms include "musical imagery repetition" and "involuntary musical imagery".

Earworms can occur with 'positive' or 'negative' music. Positive music in this case would be music that sounds happy and/or calm. Negative music would be the opposite, where the music sounds angry or sad. Earworms are also not solely regulated to only music with lyrics, in a research experiment conducted by Ella Moeck and her colleagues in an attempt to find out if the positive/negative feeling of the music affected earwoms caused by that piece, they only used instrumental music. Her experiment determined that all participants experienced a similar quantity of earworms, regardless of the emotional valence, although the quality if the earworm did vary. The earworms born from the negatively valanced music brought about more distress and occurred less frequently than those produced by positively valanced music.

The part of a song that is known as the chorus is one of the most reported causes of earworms.

One tool used to gather data on involuntary musical imagery (INMI) and more specifically earworms, is called the Involuntary musical imagery scale, it was created with the research compiled from George Floridou, Victoria Williamson, and Danial Müllensiefen. It uses four factors to measure different experiences surrounding earworms and INMI in general. Those four factors include 'Negative Valence', 'Movement', 'Personal Reflections', and 'Help'. Negative Valence is the category that measures the subjective response to the INMI experience. Movement is a relatively new aspect to apply to INMI, it is essentially the INMI experience with accompanied embodied responses, which can include singing, humming, and dancing. Personal Reflections is the occurrence of a personal quality, like unrelated thoughts, associated with the INMI; which are not directly related to the valence of the INMI itself. Help is the category which determines the beneficial and constructive aspects to the INMI experiences, which could potentially reflect similarities in the characteristics of unfocused music listing and task-unrelated thought.