Flip through the latest issue of Gulf Weekly.
How many times does the chorus repeat in your favourite song? How many times have you listened to that chorus? Elizabeth Hellmuth Margulis, professor and director of the Music Cognition Lab at the University of Akansas, has conducted extensive research on the topic, and has discovered that the ‘mirroring effect’ is a major factor in our love for repetition.
When you catch a new song on the radio, listen to it while shopping, hear it again in a restaurant … all of a sudden, you have a new favourite song. To investigate this, researchers asked participants to listen to classic 20th Century pieces by renowned artists which did not have repetition, and then a digitally-altered version which incorporated several repeats in the music.
Participants consistently rated the digitally-altered music as ‘more enjoyable’ and ‘more likely to have been composed by a human artist’.
Musical repetition is deeply compelling; it is almost impossible to not sing your favourite song in your head when it plays. Repetition connects each bit of music to the next, so that we cannot help but to make links and sing along. Repetition invites us into music, as active participants, rather than as passive listeners.
