The analysis showed that those songs most likely to get stuck in people’s heads shared common “melodic contours,” mainly found in Western pop music. For example, such songs often follow the ...

A song's melodic contour, or musical shape determines whether it's an earworm. These songs are simple in structure, but possess a rhythmic pattern. For example, the nursery rhyme "Twinkle ...

Melodic contour is the relative up and down changes ... You can disrupt the rhythmic contour, for example, by making all the notes in a song the same length. Do this and people have trouble ...

for example, a “d” versus a “t”. The simple “fleeting sound” in the scientists’ experiment was a very short and very hard-to-detect silent gap (about one one-hundredth of a second) embedded in a ...

meaning they have overall melodic shapes commonly found in Western pop music. For example, one of the most common contour patterns is heard in "Twinkle, Twinkle Little Star," where the first ...