There’s a reason you can’t get that one song out of your head.
Listening to sad music provokes more nostalgia than sadness.
A study published last year in PLOS One looked into why people seek out and actually like listening to sad music
People in the study reported that sad music brought up "a wide range of complex and partially positive emotions, such as nostalgia, peacefulness, tenderness, transcendence, and wonder," write the study authors.
Surprisingly, nostalgia, rather than sadness, was the most frequently reported emotion.
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Repetitive choruses are the key to a hit song.
Joseph Nunes at the University of South Carolina looked into what makes a song commercially successful in a paper published last year in the Journal of Consumer Psychology.
"Once you got on the hot 100, the more you repeated the chorus, the more word repetition, the less complex the song, the better it did," Nunes told NPR earlier this year.
In fact, for each extra repetition of the chorus "a song’s likelihood of making it to Number One, as opposed to staying at the bottom of the Billboard chart, increases by 14.5 percent," Nunes and his co-authors wrote. There is a limit, though. Nunes and his colleagues saw a "ceiling affect", above which more repetitions harmed, instead of helped, a song's chances.
The "mere exposure effect" makes us like certain music just because we hear it a lot.
But, crucially, there's a point at which it then really really starts to grate – and you get an inverted-U graph like the one above.
In an essay at Aeon, Elizabeth Hellmuth Margulis, director of the music cognition lab at the University of Arkansas, explains why repetition makes us like music: "People seem to misattribute their increased perceptual fluency – their improved ability to process the triangle or the picture or the melody – not to the prior experience, but to some quality of the object itself."
Basically, hearing a song you've heard before makes you feel clever, because your brain has already figured it out.
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The mere exposure effect might also explain why Christmas music is so divisive.
The "mere exposure effect" could have something to do with our love/hate relationship with Christmas music. We get exposed to a ton of it in a very short amount of time, which can take us all the way up the inverted-U graph and down again very quickly.
At the beginning of December, you might be feeling pretty good about hearing some festive tunes, but by the end you're likely to be burnt out.
