It seems a common thing to get a song 'stuck in your head' (earworms etc). I have at least one just about all the time, and just occasionally I realise a moment where I haven't got one and it seems quite strange. But it's never long before the next one comes along, and sometimes I feel like I have them all through the night too, or I'll wake up with a song going round prominently in my head.
I get easily 'triggered' by just a few notes and then end up humming or whistling whichever tune was evoked. When I worked in an office, my colleagues used to have great fun seeing if they could set me off. My mind also seems to play association games where it matches up a bar or so of one song with a similar passage in another song, and then mixes them DJ-style in my head, sometimes resulting in an incessant loop of the two songs.
I have idly wondered in the past how common this is, but the thing that really made me curious more recently is how I can't help tuning into random notes I hear from the world around me, not just when someone makes a ch-nking sound with a glass but even in a certain supermarket I go to, where the refrigeration units have a distinctive hum that I feel a compulsion to emulate (just quietly enough that I blend in and don't scare off other shoppers
). It's the same with rhythms sometimes. Who out there can relate to this (guessing not everyone!), and what it is about our brains that causes this?
Most of the time I don't mind or even enjoy it, but there are of course times when I have to ban certain songs from being played in the house because I find them so incredibly brain itchy (quite often whether I like them or not) that they're still driving me crazy several days afterwards. Oh, and if I go for a walk, I don't need to listen to MP3s because I've usually got an internal soundtrack, which ends up synchronising with my walking pace. I also noticed that if I get very tired, I mean really exhausted, or very often when I get ill, the 'volume' and persistence (intrusiveness) of the music increases and I've had fevers where I end up singing just a snippet of whatever the song is because it's so prominent (seems kind of like a delirium!). Oh, and I really do wince if I hear an off-note or an out-of-tune piano.
Maybe this is one for a psychology forum rather than a music one, but anyway, interested to hear your thoughts (as it were)!
(NB: otherwise I think I'm fairly neurotypical, and I'm no musical genius - I can't always recognise a note and I haven't played music since I learnt piano as a kid; I do get immense pleasure from music and I do like singing, but usually only to myself, not always that well, although I can usually recognise when I'm a bit off.
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