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Comment from eqd
Date: June 17, 2008, 5:47 am

How did we get to the point where a ’show’ is eight and a half minutes including advertisements?

How did we go from
. philosophical ruminations and historical retrospectives on existence facets common to us as a species
to
. “How ’bout all-y’all-listeners give us the material for the show and i’ll spend my lunch break editing it together for a podcast”
?

:-/

Comment from Meb
Date: June 17, 2008, 8:43 am

eqd - I believe we’re currently between seasons. What’s posted these days is bonus, not actual shows.

Comment from joey
Date: June 17, 2008, 11:04 am

I thought this was one of the best RadioLabs we’ve ever had. The great mixing and interesting listener audio commentary made for a unique experience.

Comment from eqd
Date: June 17, 2008, 11:37 am

Meb - agh! Really? If so, i totally apologize for my grumpiness (and if not, i maintain my vigorous grumpiness).

Is there a real schedule posted somewhere?
The only thing i can find is the verbiage “ABOUT RADIOLAB. Radio Lab comes out in seasons of 5 shows…” which really doesn’t seem to be true since their are more than 20 real-length episodes. (Like “The Ring and I” is not listed in any of the seasons in the main page’s “Season Archive” tab-view)

Comment from R Rosson
Date: June 17, 2008, 1:53 pm

In your Earworm podcast you mention a solution which consists of teaching the song to someone else. There is a wonderful Mark Twain story “Punch, Brothers, Punch” about a poem which the narrator can’t get out of his head. The eventual solution is to teach it to a class of students. “The result is to sad to tell” You can read this story at http://www.readbookonline.net/readOnLine/559/

Comment from Aimee
Date: June 17, 2008, 1:57 pm

I totally agree with both the comment about Journey being the stickiest AND about the evils of passing along an earworm….

…now Journey is completely stuck in my own head, dramatic symbols and all!

Comment from Julie
Date: June 17, 2008, 6:12 pm

In this earworms episode, Jad mentions that many callers sang their earworm songs with perfect pitch, and so there must be a link between earworms and perfect pitch. Well, there’s a flaw in that logic… The more likely link is between people who know they sing pretty well and also have a song stuck in their head.

Comment from Jad
Date: June 17, 2008, 8:09 pm

Julie, you’re absolutely right. Sorry for the mis-speak! And R Rosson, you’re right too. The Twain story is spot on. We thought about including mention of it (in fact, I have a psychologist on tape singing the song), but we chose not to and now I can’t remember why.

And lastly…eqd, yes, we’re in between seasons but are working very hard on Season 5. Please bear with us!

These 8 minuters are the best we can do at the moment.

Comment from Nate
Date: June 18, 2008, 7:53 am

I just think its cool that Jad responded. I was going to leave a poopy comment about the short podcasts that have been coming out lately. Then I saw that Jad replied on here and for some reason my agitation went away. he probably could have said “what ev’s you take the 8 mins and you like it, you like it and you say thank you!” still would have had the same effect. I guess i forget that the voices leaking into my eardrums late night at work actually belong to a real person… and that person reads the show comments. (this is where the little jingle from the “The more you know” PSA’s gets played) “duh duh dah daaahhhhh”

Comment from Russ Woods
Date: June 18, 2008, 9:21 am

The wait between episodes is torturous. Gimme gimme gimme. I need some more.

Comment from Red
Date: June 18, 2008, 12:30 pm

Jad, I think I speak for many of us when I say that we’ll bare with you any time you like.

Comment from Dot
Date: June 18, 2008, 1:56 pm

For me, the most Earwormy song by Journey is that one that goes “Anyway you want it, that’s the way you need it; Anyways you wa-hant-hant it…”

I would have left a message, but can’t carry a tune, thus the correlation between people with songs stuck in their head that can’t carry a tune that won’t try singing on an answering machine.

Comment from tarrou
Date: June 18, 2008, 11:08 pm

Actually, most people, including people that do not have perfect pitch, will sing a song in the key that they heard it in originally. For a popular song with a singular source, like “Don’t
Stop Believing”, this is likely the same key for almost all of us. For a folk song with many sources, like a Christmas carol, we’re more likely to sing it in varying keys. It was neat how well your broadcast showed this. (And, of course, there’s the uncommon person that simply can’t carry a tune at all and is unable to do this.)

This ability is somewhat novel to us English speakers, to the extent we don’t even realize we have it. If you speak a more tonal language, however, this is a very important skill. Information is not contained in just relative pitch differences; it is contained in absolute pitches as well. (Albeit these absolute pitches change by location, often, like accents.)

So, while I suppose it’s a self-selecting sample you got on earworms, it’s more than only that which resulted in everyone singing in key.

(I’m sorry, but I haven’t been able to find any sources about this. If I can find some, I’ll send them your way.)

Comment from Ben
Date: June 19, 2008, 10:16 am

I loved hearing about other people’s stories about the songs and how they got stuck. As little in-betweens for the big programmes, these shorts are great… And considering the length of time between me being getting a call about it and the podcast being published, i’d (baselessly) suspect this is just bonus material from the main show about earworms, rather than something being flogged as a full installment.

Comment from Jim Norman
Date: June 19, 2008, 1:26 pm

One “earworms” aspect not mentioned so far is the “stickability” of ad jingles. (Occasionally, I’m still haunted by the old Winston jingle and others!) And at Cannes this week, a radio ad campaign from Malaysia won an award using the “tunes stuck in your head” as a clever premise. You can hear it at http://www.canneslions.com/winners/radio/win_4_1_00290.htm

Comment from Marc Davenport
Date: June 19, 2008, 3:41 pm

I’ve successfully used the technique of long division to work a song out of my head. I randomly write a sufficiently large number, like 769283785729045920 and then divide 7 into it by hand. Once I’m several digits deep, then the song seems to be gone. Plus, it justifies learning long division.

btw: 109897683675577988 and change

Comment from Bryan J Busch
Date: June 19, 2008, 4:36 pm

1) I’m sorry I missed calling into the voicemail. I also use the replacement method, and my reliable standby is Franz Liszt’s Hungarian Rhapsody No. 2. (http://icanhaz.com/rhapsody) It was used in the dueling pianos scene with Daffy and Donald Duck in “Who Framed Roger Rabbit”. Works every time.

2) Do you guys not realize that you are responsible for distributing one of the worst earworms of all time? You “sometimes behave so strangely.”

P.S. It was so great to hear part of the “Akira” soundtrack on something other than my iPod!

Comment from Francis
Date: June 19, 2008, 9:48 pm

I loved this episode. Thanks Jad, and the RadioLab team!

Friends of mine have suggested “Build Me Up Buttercup” by the Foundations to be a superb earworm killer, or at least a fine song to sing instead of whatever is stuck in there (today it was “Hopelessly Devoted from Grease… And I HATE Grease)

–
Francis

Comment from meli
Date: June 20, 2008, 12:03 am

My friend told me his friend used Xanadu, and it actually works for me too! I just start singing when I have my own earworms to remove. I don’t know why, it’ s cheezy and crappy and it won’t get stuck either. weird!!

Comment from Suzanne
Date: June 21, 2008, 10:14 am

Oh my gosh… my earworm neutralizer is ALSO “Sex Machine”! Quelle coincidence!

Comment from Finn
Date: June 29, 2008, 11:20 am

On the topic of singing pop tunes on pitch, studies that have looked into this, one of the first being by Daniel Levitin:

Levitin, D. J. (1994). Absolute memory for musical pitch: Evidence from the production of learned melodies. Perception & Psychophysics. 56, 414-423.

Anyone interested can download the pdf from his website (under Research Publications). And for more recent related docs, check out the “cited by” listing in scholar.google.com .
The abstract proclaims:

Evidence for the absolute nature of long-term auditory memory is provided by analyzing the production of familiar melodies. Additionally, a two-component theory of absolute pitch is presented, in which this rare ability is conceived as consisting of a more common ability, pitch memory, and a separate, less common ability, pitch labeling. Forty-six subjects sang two different popular songs, and their productions were compared with the actual pitches used in recordings of those songs. Forty percent of the subjects sang the correct pitch on at least one trial; 12% of the subjects hit the correct pitch on both trials, and 44% came within two semitones of the correct pitch on both trials. The results show a convergence with previous studies on the stability of auditory imagery and latent absolute pitch ability; the results further suggest that individuals might possess representations of pitch that are more stable and accurate than previously recognized.

Sorry for the long post, but I research this stuff and was happy to hear the issue come up on the show.

Comment from Dave
Date: September 25, 2008, 6:59 pm

I use a technique that is a combination of the “stretch out one note” and “just embrace the song” techniques — I rearrange the song in my head: a disco version, a Reggae version, a Broadway Hit Song version, a ridiculously cheesy Vegas version, and so forth. This thoroughly kills the original song and exercises mental musical muscles.