Maybe others will relate? I'm not a headphone person but always have music playing in the background on speakers — often at a fairly low volume so it is easily ignored, talked over.
I find without the presence of external music I will have a song playing in my head instead. And generally the same song for hours (!). So I suppose the external click-track freezes up my mind somehow.
In case anyone cares, my "playlist" is local music I've purchased over the decades — maybe 4 or 5 days long? In my "lab" (man-cave, I suppose) I have a shorter, streamed playlist on the stereo that is looping over new music that I am currently "auditioning". The songs that make the cut are purchased and added eventually to the local playlist that plays elsewhere.
In the past few years, getting songs stuck in my head (earworms) has become so easy I pretty much don’t listen to music with vocals anymore. Only ambient, techno and psytrance for me. (Pop I imagine would be the absolute worst, lab engineered to be memorable)
I’m certain the DSM-5 might list that as a symptom of going crazy or whatever, but I don’t care to know, I guess it’s a new quirk of mine. That said, I truly dislike having neighbours practicing an instrument, which means having to suffer the same tune for far too long, and it getting stuck in my head for 2 more days.
I have music stuck in my head more or less constantly. It's never bothered, and I'm kind of surprised to find all the remedies suggested here. For me, instrumental music is no different from vocal music. It can be a riff from a solo, a chord change, an interesting timbre, or pretty much any sound. Sometimes I think they're not from songs that have yet been recorded. Just the imagination of sounds that turn over and over. I've always kind of liked it. I'm a musician myself, and I think it helps me think of old music in new ways.
Glad to find a musician here with this problem, as I suspect there are many. The moment I wake up, a song starts playing. When I practice violin, it gets pretty bad.
> In the past few years, getting songs stuck in my head (earworms) has become so easy I pretty much don’t listen to music with vocals anymore. Only ambient, techno and psytrance for me. (Pop I imagine would be the absolute worst, lab engineered to be memorable)
Same. This is partly why SomaFM (esp. Space Station Soma, Drone Zone, and Mission Control) and soundtracks are my jam.
I think it's also partly why I can't stand Vivaldi or Hiromi. Vivaldi writes classical pop -- so heavy on melody that it may as well be choral. It's easy to sing, and sounds like song, so it gets stuck in the ear. Hiromi, in turn, plays the piano quite literally like she's singing (honestly, I think she's a musical acrobat with no feel for the piano as an instrument), which results in ear worms for the same reason.
Bill Evans, by contrast, is so chock full of harmonic complexity and color that it's physically impossible to sing along with him. I never tire of him. Same for Wayne Shorter and Bach, though for different reasons.
And I just realized that this is probably partly why I hate musical theater so fervently.
> In the past few years, getting songs stuck in my head (earworms) has become so easy I pretty much don’t listen to music with vocals anymore.
Ditto the sibling comment about this happening to me for instrumental music. I have thousands of hooks floating around my head. I whistle and sing when I walk around if nobody is within earshot. 90% of the time I wake up with a melody in my head that won't go away. I kind of like it because it's developed my musical ability in a passive, cumulative way.
I know many people who say they can't live without music, cannot work or just be around home without listening to something. I understand their experience but I can't relate at all. It's not that I don't like music or that I'm particularly sensitive to noise but I practically never listen to music I put myself. I feel like I could just live without it completely.
Since I have children I almost never listen to music. The kids are such a sensory overload that, when I get a moment of silence alone, I don't want to ruin it with sound.
Depending on the age of your children, you should play music to introduce them to it. Some of my best memories from when my kids were young is of them dancing around uncontrollably to In The Hall of the Mountain King and Hergest Ridge (a particular section). They loved it. It activates something.
They need to know there's more out there than The Wiggles.
SO I worked as a professional musician for over a decade before a career change to software development... and since that change, the act of _listening_ to music has completely disappeared from my life. I cannot work or study with music on, I do not put music on when I'm home alone, I do not listen to music when driving... And for many years I gave up completely playing music even as a hobby. So although for most of my life I would have been shocked that someone could entertain the idea of living without music, I am actually now more shocked that people can do things like study or program with music on at all. In all that time though I was always impressed and surprised by what people would consider music :D
To a further extent, I know people who can't meditate or just stare at a wall for a few minutes, they must always be working or consuming or engaged in something
There’s a neuro-linguistic programming technique you can try to get rid of an earworm.
Picture a radio playing the song and imagine yourself slowly turning down the volume and the song getting quieter until it has gone.
This used to work for me but over time I’ve had to extend it with imagining switching the radio off at the end, unplugging it, and chucking it out the window so it smashes on the ground so no chance of it turning back on!
I'm glad you shared your experience because I've dealt with this for decades. It's usually a small snippet, 15 seconds or less, of a song that just loops over and over for me.
What I do to combat this, and other "brain noise", is also to listen to music but I use headphones with high volume. I also listen to the same playlist repeatedly so it's not distracting and instead quiets that loud part of my brain to allow me to focus.
I'm relieved to know from reading this thread I'm not completely crazy. I have the same thing, a very, very short snippet just repeatedly "playing". I become very conscious of it at various moments and try to "change the track" to some other repeated snippet. I've yet to find a pattern to which track is next.
It doesn’t really bother me, though sometimes I’ll think “ok, it’s time for a different earworm”. But sometimes even listening to other music will not work, and I’m still thinking about the same song.
But I generally have some song playing in my head — vocal, instrumental, doesn’t matter — constantly.
Again, doesn’t really bother me. In fact, I guess I enjoy it at some level.
But I don’t really go out of my way to not have music in my head or change the song (that I’ve been hearing for the past 10 days). It’s pretty much always songs I enjoy.
Basically, the same. I still purchase music. My collection goes back to done stuff I bought on CD in 1991 and ripped around 98. My wife finds music on YouTube, I browser RYM and then auditing stuff on YT. If it sticks, I but it.
I find it hard to manage several decades worth of playlists though. I wish music apps treated them with the same respect that albums get. Give them their own metadata like date created, owner, rating, moods etc.
>>I'm not a headphone person but always have music playing in the background on speakers — often at a fairly low volume so it is easily ignored...<<
Given the number of self-exonerating qualifications in that statement, I think that deep down you know that people who play their music aloud in the office should be shot.
When a music gets stuck in my head, somehow listening to it a few times makes it go away, as if I was craving it and listening to it would fill that hole.
I have a carefully-curated Spotify playlist -- "FLOWSTATE: Repeatable FTW"[1] -- that I specifically optimized for "flowstate" (/Cal Newport "deep work" sessions). The tracks span various moods or vibes, but all are strictly instrumental, w/ limited dynamic range or significant musical variation, and a steady, energizing beat -- ie they're each deliberately repetitive and work well set on repeat. Airpods in, pick a track that resonates w my mood, set it on repeat, set my Pomodoro timer (to remind me to stand and move instead of hyperfocus for hours straight), and I can reliably enter flowstate almost right away.
Wow that was interesting. Every track I listened to had this beat that was way too fast and heavy for me, at least it's not something I could listen to when working - it would send my blood pressure skyrocketing and make me want to go party or something. I guess this sort of thing is highly individual.
Well, it's almost 13h of varied tracks. Most do have a beat but it's much closer to chillout / downtempo than dance music. But yes, ofc, it's highly subjective.
Aye, bandcamp is the go-to. It's funny that the further production gets from someones bedroom the less likely you are to be able to buy a lossless version. All that production for a 192kbps MP3...
In my country the availability is very poor for CDs, unless I wanna spend loads of time hunting for used ones maybe. But that's far more time than I'm willing to spend when I can just pirate it.
I'll gladly give them my money, I'll pay 20€ for a flac album. I do it often enough on bandcamp. But big companies just don't care to cater to me, so they don't get my money.
On behalf of everyone else in the world, please invest in headphones.
Broadcasting in this way is boorish and the kind of thing emotionally stunted people do to inflict their will upon others. I'm not saying you're necessarily like that, but you're 'wearing their uniform' so to speak.
I find without the presence of external music I will have a song playing in my head instead. And generally the same song for hours (!). So I suppose the external click-track freezes up my mind somehow.
In case anyone cares, my "playlist" is local music I've purchased over the decades — maybe 4 or 5 days long? In my "lab" (man-cave, I suppose) I have a shorter, streamed playlist on the stereo that is looping over new music that I am currently "auditioning". The songs that make the cut are purchased and added eventually to the local playlist that plays elsewhere.