Repeat After Me
We have all experienced the feeling of utter despair and agonizing boredom every time we realize we left our headphones at home. How else will we pump ourselves up for the gym or drown out the annoying tourist asking for directions to Grand?
Most of us, if not all have a preference of music which we have carefully downloaded on our phones, iPods, iPads, etc. We replay the same music over and over…and over. Personally, I have a set playlist for the gym, traveling music, cleaning music, etc. More than once I will put this playlist on repeat and I never get bored of it. In this article, Elizabeth Margulis explains the speech-to-sound illusion . It completely changes the way you listen to music and explains why we might tap our foot to a song that we hate. I played the two loops to my mom to see if she would react as I did (somewhat surprised at what the repetition did to my brain). She listened and at the end she told me that she did hear the “so strangely” in the first one as more of a song and in the second demo she already had it stuck in her head so she was expecting it to replay.
That repetitiveness is something we are so accustomed to in music that we just cannot help it. As she explains, our brains originally focus more on the musicality of the song first rather than the words. How many catchy songs do you know that you actually know all the lyrics to, and not just the chorus?
It is also true that the more you repeat a word, the more likely it seems to lose its meaning. I think that is why people are inventing new slang words all the time. So many people repeat the other word and “wear” it out.
This is a short article I read on Repetition Compulsion.
URL: http://psychcentral.com/blog/archives/2013/06/29/repetition-compulsion-why-do-we-repeat-the-past/
Here is an excerpt:
“Humans seek comfort in the familiar. Freud called this repetition compulsion, which he famously defined as “the desire to return to an earlier state of things.”
This takes form in simple tasks. Perhaps you watch your favorite movie over and over, or choose the same entrée at your favorite restaurant. More harmful behaviors include repeatedly dating people who might emotionally or physically abuse you. or using drugs when overcome with negative thoughts. Freud was more interested in the harmful behaviors that people kept revisiting, and believed that it was directly linked to what he termed “the death drive,” or the desire to no longer exist” .
4 responses so far
I would personally disagree with this. It could be like this for many people, but not for me. I have never seemed to be interested in the “catchy” song, movie, or even book. If something is played to often on the radio, or if a book/movie is hyped up by too many I completely reject it. Normally i wait for a while after the hype has died down, and then listen/watch/read it. It is only then that I can assess it properly and without bias.
I also do not pay attention to just the chorus, though i have to agree that the chorus is the most memorable part of the song; I listen to the lyrics. I am the type of person that will look up the lyrics online so that I can listen to the song and read what is being sung. The meaning in the music is what I am after, not just the musicality. Although, the musicality is nice and it obviously makes the songs, but I would have to believe there are others like me that are looking for something more than just repetitiveness.
An example of a repetitive harmful behavior that I think of most often is the sad or heartbroken emotional state. If I look at my most bleak or disparaging moment, somehow I still remember feeling a sort comfort in that despair. Having spoken about this phenomena with others, I have found others tend to agree. Furthermore I’ve concluded some people have permanently made that sort of negative or unhappy emotional state their primary residence, having been in that bleak state most often, they find comfort and understand pain more then anything else, and by a stretch I could even say that some go out of their way to entangle themselves back in that bleak state when they find themselves outside of it, even if by unconscious action.