Do you find yourself with tunes running around in your head?

Very often.

Usually something I’ve heard recently.
Almost always when I’m doing something repetitive like walking or doing dishes.
Sometimes tunes pop into my head triggered by a name or something somebody said.

It happens to almost everyone.
It’s simply a lapse in you short term memory.
Say if you go an listen to a song before you leave the house. It’s the last dominant thing you’ll hear. It sort of gets passed through into long term memory whether you want it to or not, and it stay in the short term because there’s nothing of that kind to replace it.

Interestingly it doesn’t happen to dogs because their short term memory works differently to ours.

Yes, and the worst part is, sometimes I get a certain song in my head that I DON’T want there for any reason and it won’t go away no matter how hard I try to distract myself. In cases like this, I’ll go find a music source at my earliest opportunity and try to listen to other music to drown out the one in my head making me insane.

Pachelbel’s Canon has been my almost constant companion for over a year now. I used to like it. Now, not so much.

Constantly it is how I deal with life. When I go home I put on my “space helmet” (earphones) and let “Scotty beam me up”. When I am listening to a good song my troubles go away. Music is therapy for me and a good tune left in my head can help me through the day.

Usually putting on earphones an listening to something else will cure an earworm for me.

@cage I dunno. I heard my dog woofing out the tune to ‘It’s a Small World After All’.

There’s a song we sang this Christmas at our concert called “Hot Chocolate”. I CAN’T get it out of my head. I love it! If you’d like to hear it, go to jwpepper.com. type in ‘hot chocolate’ for the key word. When it comes up, scroll about half way down the page & click on Mp3 audio. It’ll load & play. It’s a great song. I think I’ll still be singing it in July! We had such a fun time singing it.

I’m not sure if others have had this experience, but I’ve spent a bit of time in very remote places for sometimes several months in a row with no music whatsoever.. That’s when it gets really interesting, because there is no external musical stimulus and sometimes the songs that pop up aren’t ones you particularly liked, and often you haven’t heard them since you were a kid…and as you say sometimes they’re from cartoons or tv ads etc..

So absolutely. My experience is the less music you hear, the more music you hear…

Beethoven’ 9th often pops in, but so does the bananasplits themesong?, the vegemite tune (for fellow Aussies)?, and Bad Moon Rising by Creedence???..repeatedly…no idea why, never owned an album, came out before I was born I think…

constantly

Allways, and it’s allways 2–4 songs at the same time!

I’ve had the same Flock Of Seagulls song running through my head since Saturday! It’s driving me nuts!!! I guess I should be happy it’s not Pachelbel’s Canon, though…

Every day. All. Damn. Day. Mostly it’s just in the background, which is annoying – but not terrible. In quiet moments, it can drive me absolutely ‘round the bend. Unless I am seriously exhausted, it is really distracting at bedtime. I have to drown it out by singing lullabies (loudly) in my head. I’ve often wondered if it’s not one of the reasons I can’t handle a lot of noise and chaos around me. The outside stimulation combined with the constant inside stimulation may just be too much for me.

Currently it’s Put Your Records On, from watching (dammit) American Idol two nights ago!

I wake up every morning with a song already “playing”, mid-sentence sometimes. It’s a different song every day and it lasts all day. It drives me crazy sometimes because I can not get it out of my head. What usually ends up happening is that I’ll start to unintentionally mix the lyrics with those of another song I heard sometime during the day. I won’t realize it for a while, until I start to sing it out loud and notice that the lyrics are quite funny sometimes.

Does anyone else mostly have the never before heard music? @Critter38 mentioned the impact of being in a place with no music, and that seemed like it might be similar to my situation. I almost never listen to recorded music. The music I listen to is music that I, or my kids, or my friends make. The music I make with friends is always never-before-heard.

Hmmm. Maybe I am remembering some of that, and that’s why I don’t recognize it. I only heard it once, when I was making it.

But I have the sense that it is a gift that comes from nowhere. I feel like I should record these fragments when I hear them, and then use them later. I have heard many composers and writers expressing the same idea about inspiration. Some say God gives it to them; some say a muse; but for many people, it does seem to come from outside them, as if it had nothing to do with them.

That’s the part that interests me. Any ideas?

@daloon So wait… the music you hear, you’ve never heard it before? Yeah, that sounds like the composer’s gift. Write it down if you know music notation. Hum/Sing it into a recorder if you don’t. Try to figure out if it is truly original or just something you heard but didn’t realize you knew.

If it’s original, get it published, or at least copyright it. Or start a band and go pop-star on us and we’ll all say, “Yeah we knew him back on fluther.com”. At any rate, persue it.

Music is very mathematical from my understanding, which combinations and tempos work and which do not…I wonder if those humans who are brilliant composers or like yourself have new melodies play in their heads are tapping into a capacity to forumulate such combinations of notes, like a genius mathematician can calculate things in their head that we would ahve trouble doing on paper.

Sounds wonderful!

okay, bad pun intended

@daloon I do what you do, but kind of different, I guess. Aside from the songs I have heard before, I also dream about music. Entirely new to me, complete with lyrics and music, I will be singing along to it when I’m on a very old-fashioned ship, sailing down a huge river at the end of the day, everything bathed in golden sun. It’s the same setting every time, but it’s always a new song. Some of them are quite beautiful and very moving. I remember waking up crying one time, simply because of how beautiful one of the songs was. Unfortunately, something usually wakes me up other than my natural clock so I’m jolted out of the dream and can’t recall most of the music.

@DrasticDreamer Dang! That is drastic. I tend to dream about houses I’ve never been in. In great detail which I can remember. I used to sort of capitalize on those dreams a bit when I was a Dungeon Master (back in the day) and would make scenarios based on those houses. (Sorry… segue… I’ll hush).

very often. Usually the same tune for a few days and then it changes. And it’s not necessarily a song I like. It could even be a song I hate, but I take the basic tune and change it around in my head and then it just sticks.

Being a songwriter myself I’d like to note something here: the only real difference between different genres and “good” or “bad” songs is the arrangements (think of all the remakes and how much they can differ from the original). So the melody line is a very basic thing, the raw material out of which songs are made. And this purity can make catchy the tune of a song that as an end result was crap due to bad production.

Sure, all the time. The last earworm I had was an old one-hit-wonder disco tune called “All Night Thing” a couple of days ago.

It happens to me a lot. Smoking weed makes it stop.

Thanks for the tip Pete! Maybe I’ll try that…

Always.

The only way I can stop it is to sing “Electric Avenue”

Yes. Always. I’m given to understand that it relates to OCD.

My dentist yells at me for grinding my teeth, because I have wear from clicking my eyeteeth together to the beat of my earworm of the moment. Can’t stop. I have done this since childhood. I’m weird like that.

@laureth Interesting link. I never even thought of it that way. I have obssesive thought problems, and used to be a big ‘counter’. Medication has helped everything except the earworms! I wonder why that is?

I don’t mind it, and I wouldn’t want it to stop. I’d just like to know if anyone has ideas about what’s going on. In particular, why is the tune sometimes from someone else, and at other times something I’ve never consciously heard before?

My theory is that it is the part of my brain that doesn’t have language. That’s the same part that gets “released” when I dance or play music, or am in “the zone” with whatever activity that takes me there.

It’s interesting to me that when this part of the mind is ascendant, people have a real hard time remembering anything. The other thing I notice is that it doesn’t happen when I’m talking or writing. So I’m pretty sure that use of language either drowns it out, or stops it entirely. The moment I stop “thinking” the music comes back.

I think that the mind has multiple ways of thinking. We are used to the way of thinking and remembering that happens with the use of language. We don’t understand the other kind of thinking, probably because we can’t actually talk about it. It does not have language. It works differently. Maybe some would call it the subconscious.

So I wonder if these tunes are messages from this other part of my brain. Unfortunately, I have no idea how to interpret these messages. Maybe they are about mood. But maybe they are about ideas or problems I’ve been working on.

Anyway, this afternoon’s tune was a classical theme, that I believe was used as the theme for a British television show back in the 70’s. There was one about a ship that we used to watch faithfully, though I can’t remember the name of it. Or it might have been “Eyeless in Gaza,” but my money is on the ship theme.

Do you ever look at yourself as if you were a bug on a slide, and think, ‘how interesting, and yet, so difficult to explain’?

All the time, Daloon…all the time. :)

@cage , I’ve often wondered why my dog never hums tunes, even though he’s doing nothing all day.

It’s very common to get a song running through your head (I call them ear worms). But if it’s a song you’ve never heard, I would highly encourage you to write it down.

Beethoven went completely dear, but continued to compose. Even though he couldn’t hear his music externally, he still heard it internally.

Who knows?

It would be nice to be able to capture it, but they happen when I’m running around—not a good time to stop and write it down.

Interestingly, a lot of questions occur along with the music. Of course, I forget them, too, by the time I get anywhere I can write them down.

Daloon, you should get yourself one of those mini digital recorders. You could hum the tune into it, as well as recording your questions for later use.

Hmmm. What a great idea. I wonder if they have enough quality to record live music in rooms with uncertain acoustics, too?

YYEEESSSSSSSSSS my girlfriend is often wandering around the house with these random sometimes fast sometimes slow, varying in pitch and tone hums. From the sound of them i can tell she is into it deep. At least she has a future as a composer.

Right now, I’ve got the Potter Pals Mysterious Ticking Noise song going through my head….

Snape. Snape. Se-ver-us Snape…

constantly! and i don’t know where they come from, sometimes it’s a song i haven’t heard in years.

daloon, it is what I said in my earlier post: the melody line in our heads is very basic (and therefore crude but also pure) stuff. This is why we often end up humming songs that we don’t necessarily like in their finished form (but to us the original idea sounded good).

As for Beethoven, when you reach his level of expertise, you don’t need to hear what you’re writing, you know it anyway. It is exactly with a writer of words. We all know what my previous sentence would sound like without me having to read it out loud, and I could even imagine what it would sound like if I went deaf.

It’s not even a question of Beethoven’s talent, it’s simply practice. (I can’t do it myself but know several musicians that can read music in the same way most people read text).

@Jack79 I can’t read music like I read text, but I’m pretty close. My son got a new piece in his lesson this morning, and I ran through it in my head, and when I heard it played, that’s the way it sounded (except for a rythmic problem I had because I thought there was an extra note where there wasn’t).

Today’s tune was fairly simple, with three decending notes and then some embellishment. Then I took it, and ran with it, until something distracted me. Now, I can’t remember what it was. Oh well. Another will come along.

I’ve still got that same song stuck in my head!!! Somebody please help me!!!

@loser sing Electric Avenue. It is like a musical erasure. First you only remember part of it and then no one wants to keep singing it so you stop.

Yes.