This is really not cool. I woke up this morning with Sheena Easton's "Morning Train" stuck in my mind. I kind of figured it would disappear fairly rapidly, but nope. It is heading toward noon and I still have it going.
It made me think that there might be a kind of cool and easy research project looking at what makes a song stick in one's mind. There would be two aspects to the research, one is characteristics of the song, and the other is the characteristics of the person. One is environment and the other is internal. It turns out that is just a variation on my usual types of research.
Music could be analyzed using the Music Genome Project...better known by its commercial product Pandora. A shared Pandora channel could be created, where people could enter the songs that get stuck in one's head. Then genome project could then analyze the common characteristics of the songs.
The personality aspects would be more difficult. The suspected characteristics would have to be measured, and then the people would have to indicate how often they have music stuck in their mind. The problem is that how often has the potential to be very subjective, or influenced by memory which could covary with the personality measures. This can be worked out, but would require care.
Now the key question: Is it worth the effort?
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