Most of us have experienced a catchy tune looping in our minds, but how accurately do we recall the music? A new study published in Attention, Perception, & Psychophysics reveals that these “earworms” may be stored more precisely in our brains than we think. Researchers found that nearly half of the sung renditions matched the original pitch of the songs, challenging previous beliefs about the limits of our musical memory.
The phenomenon of earworms is widespread, affecting over 90% of people, yet little is known about the precision of these involuntary musical memories. Most people lack perfect pitch, meaning they generally cannot recall exact musical notes without a reference. However, prior studies have hinted that people might remember melodies at a more precise pitch than expected, even if they can’t name the notes. The researchers aimed to see if this precise recall extended to earworms—songs that arise spontaneously rather than those we deliberately try to remember.
“I first learned about the field of music cognition from Daniel Levitin’s book This Is Your Brain On Music. In that book, he describes a study where they found evidence for absolute pitch recall in voluntarily-recalled musical imagery – and I tried it myself, and it worked, and I’ve been hooked on the topic of musical memory ever since,” said study author Matthew G. Evans, a PhD candidate at UC Santa Cruz and member of the High Level Perception Lab.
“Once I started my PhD program, the challenge of investigating whether this accurate recall is seen in involuntarily-recalled imagery, or ‘earworms,’ was really appealing, and I was excited about the opportunity to design a study to address that question.”
To conduct the study, the researchers recruited 30 undergraduate students who participated in a two-week study. Participants received random text messages throughout the day, prompting them to record any song that happened to be playing in their minds. They were instructed to sing the tune they were experiencing as accurately as possible and submit their recording via smartphone. While most participants had some familiarity with music, they did not necessarily have formal training, and none reported having perfect pitch.
This approach, called the experience sampling method, allowed researchers to capture the spontaneous nature of these musical memories in real time. The researchers then compared each recording to the original song, analyzing how closely the pitch of the sung earworm matched the song’s actual key. If the song had only one standard recorded version, the comparison was straightforward; otherwise, recordings where the exact version of the song was unclear were discarded.
Of the usable recordings, 44.7% matched the original song’s pitch exactly. Expanding the margin slightly, nearly 69% of recordings were within one semitone of the original pitch. This degree of accuracy is much higher than would be expected by random chance. For instance, if participants were singing their earworms at random pitches, only about 8% would be expected to match the original pitch.
Even more intriguing was the absence of a strong influence from recent listening. Some participants reported that their earworm was triggered by recently hearing the song, yet this group’s pitch accuracy was not significantly different from those who hadn’t heard the song recently.
“Due to the nature of our study, our data were collected in the ‘real world’ rather than in a laboratory,” Evans told PsyPost. “Because we had less control over what our participants were doing when they responded to our survey prompts, we wondered if people were just singing songs they had recently heard and, therefore, still had memory traces in their short-term memory, rather than recalling from long-term memory. But when we divided our data into responses where participants said they had recently heard the song and those where they hadn’t, we saw absolutely no difference in absolute pitch accuracy.”
These results suggest that our brains may retain a detailed “absolute pitch” memory for familiar songs, even in people without perfect pitch. Traditionally, musical memory was thought to work mainly on relative pitch—recognizing the relationships between notes without needing to recall their exact frequencies. This study challenges that view by showing that even involuntary musical memories, such as earworms, contain remarkably accurate pitch information.
“Whether or not you think of yourself as a ‘good’ singer, there are elements of your musical memories that your brain preserves accurately without any effort on your part—and without you even knowing it,” Evans explained. “The next time you have a song stuck in your head, you can check for yourself! Try to hold the pitch in your mind while you look up the original song—odds are way above chance that they’ll match.”
However, like all studies, this one has some limitations. The sample size was relatively small and consisted only of students from one university, limiting the generalizability of the findings. Additionally, because many participants had some musical training, the results might not apply to people with no musical experience at all.
“I look forward to collecting more data from a wider body of participants—there are so many questions left to investigate, and this type of dataset is uniquely useful,” Evans said.
The study, “Absolute pitch in involuntary musical imagery,” was authored by Matthew G. Evans, Pablo Gaeta, and Nicolas Davidenko.
