Why we love repetition in music - Elizabeth Hellmuth Margulis

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How many times does the chorus repeat in your favorite song? And take a moment to think. How many times have you listened to it? Chances are you've heard that chorus repeated dozens, if not hundreds of times. And it's not just popular songs in the West that repeat a lot. Repetition is a feature that music from cultures around the world tends to share. So why does music rely so heavily on repetition? One part of the answer comes from what psychologists call the mere exposure effect. In short, people tend to prefer things they've been exposed to before. For example, a song comes on the radio that we don't particularly like, but then we hear the song at the grocery store, at the movie theater, and again on the street corner. Soon, we are tapping to the beat, singing the words, even downloading the track. This mere exposure effect doesn't just work for songs. It also works for everything from shapes to Super Bowl ads. So what makes repetition so uniquely prevalent in music? To investigate, psychologists asked people to listen to musical compositions that avoided exact repetition. They heard excerpts from these pieces in either their original form or in a version that had been digitally altered to include repetition. Although the original versions had been composed by some of the most respected 20th century composers, and the repetitive versions had been assembled by brute force audio editing, people rated the repetitive versions as more enjoyable, more interesting, and more likely to have been composed by a human artist. musical repetition is deeply compelling. Think about the Muppets classic, Ma-Na-Ma-Na. If you've heard it before, it's almost impossible after I sing Ma-Na-Ma-Na not to respond, Repetition connects each bit of music irresistibly to the next bit of music that follows it. So when you hear a few notes, you're already imagining what's coming next. Your mind is unconsciously singing along, and without noticing, you might start humming out loud. Recent studies have shown that when people hear a segment of music repeated, they are more likely to move or tap along to it. Repetition invites us into music as imagined participants rather than as