WagooMusic

They go by many names: Brain worms, sticky music (thanks Oliver Sacks), cognitive itch, stuck song syndrome. but the most common (if also the most repugnant) is earworms, a literal translation from Ohrwurm, a term used to describe the phenomenon (and perhaps bring to mind an immediate association with corn earworms). if you’re an academic, you might refer to it as Involuntary Musical Imagery, which, of course, gets condensed to INMI.

What are we talking about? Again, back to the academics, specifically, C. Phillip Beaman and Tim I. Williams from the University of Reading, who in a 2010 paper, explain it like this: “Simply, an earworm is the experience of an inability to dislodge a song and prevent it from repeating itself in one’s head.”

In the last five years, earworms have become the subject of peer-reviewed scientific studies. In 2006, Steven Brown of Simon Fraser University even studied his own earworms and observed in the Journal of Consciousness Studies that they could be used as a basis for understanding how conscious experience can be split into multiple parallel streams. In 2008, moreover, Finnish researchers published a study that used the Interrnet to survey age, gender, personality and musical and linguistic competence of 12,420 countrymen who experienced the endless loops in their heads.

A recent entry into this growing literature is: “how do earworms start?” the paper, published online in Psychology of Music on September 27 by researchers from the University of London, characterizes the vast range of things that impel Involuntary Musical Imagery.

The study was an exercise in crowd sourcing. BBC radio station 6 Music runs a morning breakfast show in which listeners describe their earworms. Taking 2,424 reports during several months in both 2009 and 2010, the researchers analyzed 333 of them. the study also included  an analysis of 271 of the 1308 responses to online questionnaires from BBC sites as well as radio networks in the U.S. and Australia. the results are not entirely surprising, but they do demonstrate that almost any thought or sensory perception can hit the “on” switch. Hearing the Village People’s “YMCA” can get the mental tape rolling. Other head music may be induced by a memory from summer camp, the stresses of work or simply the boredom of office meetings.

As a contribution from the science of everyday life, earworms could conceivably provide a window onto what 19th century German memory research pioneer Hermann Ebbinghaus called involuntary memory retrieval. perhaps. even if earworm “entomology”comes to naught, though, some of the answers to earworm surveys are still a hoot. Here’s a couple of examples from the Psychology of Music paper that was referenced by a BPS Research Digest blog post, which inspired me to write this one. (Also don’t forget the Internet earworm community.)

—”my bloody earworm is that George Harrison song you played yesterday. Woke at 4:30 this morning with it going round me head. PLEASE DON’T EVER PLAY IT AGAIN!!!”

—“I get it [“Portsmouth”] every time I travel along the same road in Blackpool, seldom anywhere else. When it happens it takes 24 hours to disappear.”

We solicited readers’ nominations for the most annoying earworms yesterday via Facebook. We winnowed the list and now are presenting this poll to ask readers to vote for the worst, most tiresome earworm plaguing us, thanks to supermarket music, radio and TV jingles, waiting room speakers and so on. Vote now to see the outcome.

Image: MarsBars/iStockphoto

Hunched over the piano, Rasha Hamad starts rocking on her chair, her teeth bared in a pained grimace, her eyes squeezed shut. “I want to go the zoo, I want to go to the zoo,” she mumbles in English as she launches into a Chopin mazurka.

The music is beautiful, her performance is reminiscent of Geoffrey rush in the film, Shine. As she moves onto a piece that is unfamiliar, less harmonious, somebody touches her shoulder signalling that she should stop. She runs her fingers fast down the keyboard and lifts them off in a theatrical flourish.

Abruptly she stands up and, briefly disorientated, walks into the wall. She is gently guided back to the door.

Ms Hamad, a 36-year-old Palestinian from the northern West Bank, is blind, mentally disabled and severely autistic. That she is able to play at all is thanks to an unlikely pairing with Devorah Schramm, an Orthodox Jew, which began when Ms Hamad was 11.

Mrs Schramm, who lives in Gilo, a Jewish settlement on the outskirts of Jerusalem, was unfazed by taking on an Arab student, even though some of her regular Jewish students would say, "You’re teaching her?" but the American-born teacher, who wears a heavy, brown wig as her religion dictates, describes herself as apolitical, and says that she hates to put people in "boxes".

Yet without a medium such as music to bring them together, examples of such friendships between Arabs and Israelis are still rare. Under her tutelage, Ms Hamad has blossomed from a girl unable to express herself into an accomplished concert pianist. As her musical expression has flourished, so, too, have her verbal skills. She can hold a conversation in Arabic, Dutch or English.

Mrs Schramm had just had her third child when she received the call from the Jerusalem Conservatory of Music and Arts asking her if she would take on a blind student. "of course, they didn’t tell me she was in her own world, and that I wouldn’t really have a language with her," the piano teacher recalls. "She spoke very little and sometimes she didn’t speak at all."

At her first lesson, Ms Hamad sat down and started to play. "I heard something that told me that the music speaks to her at a very deep level. The depth of this makes the musician," she says. "Music to me isn’t just correctly moving your fingers, music is something very deep within the human spirit."

Ms Hamad is one of the fortunate ones. at the age of four, she was brought along with her blind, deaf and mute sister to the Vollbehrs, a Dutch missionary couple who would later establish Beit Yemima, a school and orphanage for handicapped children near Bethlehem.

The two girls were badly malnourished, constantly banging their heads and poking their eyes, forcing the missionaries to sew up the ends of their sleeves.

The Vollbehrs first discovered Ms Hamad’s musical talent when she started to sing along in harmony to hymns, prompting the couple to buy her an old piano on which the late Helena Vollbehr taught her to play. As she progressed, the Vollbehrs brought her to the Conservatory, where she was paired up with mrs Schramm.

"her playing was quite peculiar. She used to bunch her fingers together," the teacher recalls. "I was fascinated that she was using sophisticated harmony. You’d expect somebody mentally disabled to do something quite rudimentary. From the first lesson, I said this is very striking."

Even more striking was Ms Hamad’s extraordinary memory, something that has become more apparent as the relationship between the two women developed. "She can hear something on the radio – it could be 20 years ago – and she will start playing it," mrs Schramm says. "She’ll say it was a Chopin concerto, but I know it’s not a Chopin concerto, but it sounds like Chopin… I’ll spend time in the music library, and then … [I'll say] ‘By George, that’s what she played!’"

At other times, she would play her own compositions, which her teacher describes as "the most exciting of all". During springtime Ms Hamad is at her most inspired. "During one lesson, she sat for an hour and started playing something out of her soul. It was unbelievable," says mrs Schramm, adding that Ms Hamad’s music is "very dark".

It is through mrs Schramm’s work with Ms Hamad that the Conservatory started up a programme to teach musical instruments to special needs children, funded by the Jerusalem Foundation, and Ms Hamad’s story will be showcased in a short film when the Conservatory’s youth orchestra performs in London this week.

Mrs Schramm says that her experience with Ms Hamad has opened doors to other disabled children. "To liberate a soul somewhat confined in such a state such as autism is to free them, like giving them wings to fly," she says.

But freedom is a fragile thing in Israel. During the Second Intifada, Ms Hamad and her teacher found themselves on opposite sides of the firing lines as Palestinian militants in Beit Jala fired on Gilo – Ms Hamad would miss lessons, leaving her highly agitated and distressed.

Now a financial crisis is crippling the Beit Yemima centre and Ms Hamad is a drain on its finances, due to the time and money spent trying to secure her permits to cross into Israel. The centre has contemplated cutting her lessons at the Conservatory. such a step would, mrs Schramm says, be disastrous for Ms Hamad’s mental state and professional development: "they say savants dry up if they are not stimulated," she says.

7:30 TONIGHT, PARAMUS

As a college student at Barnard, Suzanne Vega was a regular at Tom’s Restaurant, a Morningside Heights greasy spoon. she turned her time there into a little song you may know — “Tom’s Diner.” one of the most sampled tracks in history, her song has been remixed and covered by artists from Tupac to R.E.M. Vega, an artist-in-residence at Bergen Community College this week, is offering a master class open to the public.

TELL ME MORE: “Tom’s Diner” gave Vega another unexpected accolade: “Mother of the MP3.” the German audio engineer credited with developing digital music compression technology used a CD recording of “Tom’s Diner” to test and improve the tools.

“I feel I had a tiny role in history, which I’m proud of, I have to say,” she recently told Spinner magazine. “I’m also aware that it sort of led to the whole demise of the music industry as we know it. It was almost incidental that they used my voice.”

Vega is also legendary for another song released on the 1987 “Solitude Standing” album: “Luka,” written from the perspective of an abused boy. the song was an instant hit, and groundbreaking for examining social issues in a pop song.

The singer-songwriter will be conducting hands-on sessions with Bergen Community College students in the music and creative writing programs this week.

“We thought she was a great example of someone who crossed the boundary of music and literature,” said Andy Krikun, a professor in the music department.

At the evening program, open to the public, Vega will talk about her career and songwriting process and play some of her music.

QUOTE: “I have a photographer friend, Brian Rose, who has taken pictures of the lower East Side of Manhattan and the Berlin Wall. He told me once long ago that he felt as though he saw the world through a pane of glass. This struck me as romantic and alienated, and I wanted to write a song from this viewpoint.” — Suzanne Vega on her inspiration for “Tom’s Diner,” to the New York Times in 2008

DETAILS: Anna Maria Ciccone Theater, 400 Paramus Road. $30, seniors $20. Visit tickets.bergen.edu or call 201-447-7428.