November 12 - 18, 2014
531 views
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.
