Earworms from Three Angles: Situational Antecedents, Personality Predisposition and the Quest for a Musical Formula

Involuntary, spontaneous cognitions are common, everyday experiences that occur against a backdrop of deliberate goal-directed mentation (Christoff, Ream & Gabrieli, 2004). One such phenomenon may hold special promise for empirical investigation of this often elusive experience. Involuntary musical imagery (INMI) or ‘earworms’ are vivid, identifiable, and affect 91.7% of the population at least once a week (Liikkanen, 2012). Utilizing an online survey instrument (http://earwormery.com/) we collected several thousand reports of earworm episodes, in collaboration with the BBC. Study 1 employed a qualitative grounded theory analysis to explore themes relating to the situational antecedents of INMI experiences (Williamson et al., 2011). The analysis revealed four main trigger themes for INMI experiences and categorized the role of different music media. Study 2 used structural equation modeling (SEM) to relate individual differences in INMI characteristics and isolated an influence of obsessive compulsive traits. Study 3 comprised a computational analysis of the musical structure of several hundred earworm tunes and compared them to matched control tunes. A statistical classification model was employed to predict whether a tune could be classified as an earworm based on its