Why Do Songs Get Stuck in Your Head? Earworms, Memory and Mark Twain

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Why does a tune keep returning after the music stops? Explore earworms, also called involuntary musical imagery, through an original musical demonstration, research on exposure and melodic features, and Mark Twain's 1876 fiction.

A complete audio edition with the original musical examples. Research can identify tendencies; it does not provide a guaranteed hit recipe. AI-narrated.

SOURCES (consulted 21 October 2026) Jakubowski, Finkel, Stewart & Müllensiefen (2017), Dissecting an Earworm: Melodic Features and Song Popularity Predict Involuntary Musical Imagery https://www.apa.org/pubs/journals/releases/aca-aca0000090.pdf

Williamson et al. (2012), How do earworms start? Classifying the everyday circumstances of involuntary musical imagery https://eprints.whiterose.ac.uk/id/eprint/90893/

Byron & Fowles (2015), Repetition and recency increases involuntary musical imagery of previously unfamiliar songs https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/abs/10.1177/0305735613511506

Killingly & Lacherez (2023), The song that never ends: The effect of repeated exposure on the development of an earworm https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/10.1177/17470218231152368

Williamson, Liikkanen, Jakubowski & Stewart (2014), Sticky Tunes: How Do People React to Involuntary Musical Imagery? https://journals.plos.org/plosone/article?id=10.1371/journal.pone.0086170

Mark Twain (1876), A Literary Nightmare, The Atlantic Monthly, February, pp. 167–169 https://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/1876/02/a-literary-nightmare/630683/

University of Kansas Libraries, Robert B. Riss Collection, Clemens, Samuel [Mark Twain], MS 331 box 1 folder 37 https://digital.lib.ku.edu/ku-riss/113

RELATED LISTENING Find the musical goosebumps episode in this podcast feed. Diminished History on YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/@DiminishedHistory

CREDITS & RIGHTS Original narration, editorial argument, visual diagrams and seven-note musical demonstration: Diminished History. Existing authorized channel ident. No borrowed song lyrics, recordings, melodies, footage or photographs. Typeface: URW Base35 (P052/Nimbus Sans), AGPL with font exception; licence retained with editable sources.