This week our earworms project received some fantastic new converage thanks to CNN online media. Talented writer Simon Hooper has composed an article about our progress as a team and he even includes some quotes from the band Squeeze (one of my favourites!).  As if that wasn’t enough joy, there is even a picture of Paul McCartney in the headline – the inner Beatles fan in me squealed with delight upon seeing this additional visual!

The CNN piece can be found here: CNN on eaworms

It is really great to see that the work we are doing is inspiring so much interest. I hope that his new coverage leads many more people to visit our15 minute questionnaire at earwormery.com and to tell us about the music that gets stuck in their heads.

Why would you take the questionnaire? Although there is an interesting link with pop songs that is covered in this article, we are not interested in composing anything for the music industry – we are scientists and we want to study this phenomenon so we might better understand how our minds work. The more people take the survey the more likely it is we will be able to hunt down the causes of earworms. We want to know what purpose earworms might serve in everyday life and how we might better control them, and we aim to do this by better understanding who gets them and under what circumstances. We are also in a unique position to analyse the musical structure of earworm tunes themselves, and to learn about how and why certain musical features get stuck in our heads.

Taking a wider view, earworms are a uniquely powerful clue to how our unconscious minds work: Like the dark side of the moon and the deep ocean, the unconscious mind is a new hidden frontier of scientific research. The difference between earworms and the ocean/moon is that everyone can be involved in exploring the mind – all your unique experiences are invaluable to our research. Basically, your insights give us our direction. So huge thanks to everyone who has taken part so far. And for everyone else; we look forward to hearing from you soon!

Visit the earwormery

CNN article on earworms by Simon Hooper

This week I was kindly invited to appear on the 6Music breakfast show which is hosted by Shaun Keaveny. The aim of appearance was to update Shaun’s listeners as to the progress of the earworm project, as 6Music are our partners in this endeavour, and to thank them all for their kind contributions. Also, obviously, to drum up some more support for the questionnaire hosted at http://earwormery.com!

The link to the show is here and you can listen to the show itself for another 5 days. My bit appears about 2 hours and 13 minutes into the broadcast.

Thanks to everyone at 6Music for their continued fantastic support.  It is fantastic fun being on Shaun’s show. The only problem is that he is so funny; I have to fight hard to control my giggles in order to reply to his questions! I hope people found the interview interesting and if you have any thoughts or questions then please do feel free to leave comments here or, if they are lengthier then please write to me at earwomery@googlemail.com.  I aim to reply to everyone, but forgive me if takes a little time…life is busy at the earwormery at times!

Me and Shaun just after the broadcast in the 6Music studio