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Why you can't stop singing 'Dancing Queen'
By Sarah Rodman
BOSTON GLOBE
Thursday, July 17, 2008
It only takes a single exposure, and in an instant, your whole day can change. One minute you're minding your own business and the next you find that you can't stop thinking, humming or singing "Dancing Queen."
"Friday night and the lights are low . . . "
No matter what you try, you can't shake it. In fact, once you start thinking about ABBA, you're a goner. Next thing you know, you've moved to this: "If you change your mind/I'm the first in line . . . "
This phenomenon is no doubt about to happen on a widespread scale when "Mamma Mia!," the film based on the Broadway musical built around ABBA songs, opens in theaters Friday. As people leave the cineplex belting out the tunes sung by stars Meryl Streep, Pierce Brosnan and Colin Firth, the ABBA invasion will begin anew.
ABBA's songs continue to endure as what scientists have dubbed "earworms" 35 years after the band's first album was released. Like those little bugs, the tunes burrow into our brains and keep hitting the repeat button.
With all this renewed interest, we wondered if it was possible to break down scientifically why the music is so irresistible.
What makes ABBA songs catchy is to an extent what makes most music memorable, from Bach to the Beatles. But, says Daniel Levitin, author of "This Is Your Brain on Music: The Science of a Human Obsession" and associate professor at McGill University, there are some individual factors.
"For one thing, the way their songs are performed and produced, quite apart from the underlying composition, gives them an overall catchy sound," says Levitin, a musician and former producer whose forthcoming book, "The World in Six Songs: How the Musical Brain Created Human Nature," further explores the music-mind connection.
The multitracked harmonies of singers Agnetha Faltskog and Frida Lyngstad awaken the part of our brains in which our inner caveman is still enjoying a Paleolithic hootenanny with the rest of his clan.
"If you look at the evolutionary biology of the species and the chemical reactions we have to events in the world, for tens of thousands of years when we as a species heard music we heard groups singing it, not an individual and not an individual standing on a stage," says Levitin. "So the ABBA model of the multiple voices or the Edwin Hawkins Singers singing 'Oh Happy Day' is much closer to stimulating these evolutionary echoes of what music really is, fundamentally, closer than, say, Frank Sinatra or Miley Cyrus."
In other words, if a caveman encased in ice were to be thawed out, revived, and immediately given a full iPod, he would respond more immediately to ABBA or a gospel choir than, say, free jazz. He might eventually dig Ornette Coleman, too, but the presentation of "Knowing Me, Knowing You" would sound more familiar.
The glossy production and compositional patterns of Sweden's fab four also set off different neurological reactions that have medicinal powers. In the most upbeat of the group's songs, like "Money, Money, Money," the simplicity of ABBA's lyrics makes them easy to sing along to. In addition to the fizzy melodies, that participation, says Levitin, gives listeners "an even more powerful hit of happy juice in the brain from dopamine."
With sad songs in general, and in ABBA's case specifically with tracks like the more contemplative "The Winner Takes It All," listeners' brains produce an opposite but equally enjoyable reaction.
"You get the comfort hormone of prolactin when you hear sad music," says Levitin. "That's the same hormone that's released when mothers nurse their babies. It's soothing. And sometimes it's lyrics and sometimes it's music. I think it's most powerful when the two are well-matched and you get what I would call an emergent property where the whole is greater than the sum of its parts."
Structurally, ABBA's songs, like most enduring pop songs, generally offer a straightforward verse-chorus format that satisfies our need for order.
"In Western music we are used to that balance," says Jon Aldrich, associate professor and founder of the songwriting department at Berklee College of Music. To illustrate, Aldrich hums the melody of the sing-songy "shave and a haircut," leaving out the "two bits" conclusion. "Don't you want to hear the rest of it? You want to finish it, so with an eight measure or a 16 measure or even a 12 or a 24, the listeners feel balance and resolution."
And the main piece of the brain puzzle is the simplest of all: repetition, repetition, repetition.
"If you really want to know what makes a song powerful, I would say look at how the memory works," says physiologist Harry Witchel, a senior research fellow at the Medical School of the University of Bristol in the United Kingdom who ranked "Waterloo" as the all-time No. 1 Eurovision song contest winner for the BBC. "Memory works either through strong emotions or through repetition — that's how we normally teach. And ABBA songs allow for both of those things to occur."
By Sarah Rodman
BOSTON GLOBE
Thursday, July 17, 2008
It only takes a single exposure, and in an instant, your whole day can change. One minute you're minding your own business and the next you find that you can't stop thinking, humming or singing "Dancing Queen."
"Friday night and the lights are low . . . "
No matter what you try, you can't shake it. In fact, once you start thinking about ABBA, you're a goner. Next thing you know, you've moved to this: "If you change your mind/I'm the first in line . . . "
This phenomenon is no doubt about to happen on a widespread scale when "Mamma Mia!," the film based on the Broadway musical built around ABBA songs, opens in theaters Friday. As people leave the cineplex belting out the tunes sung by stars Meryl Streep, Pierce Brosnan and Colin Firth, the ABBA invasion will begin anew.
ABBA's songs continue to endure as what scientists have dubbed "earworms" 35 years after the band's first album was released. Like those little bugs, the tunes burrow into our brains and keep hitting the repeat button.
With all this renewed interest, we wondered if it was possible to break down scientifically why the music is so irresistible.
What makes ABBA songs catchy is to an extent what makes most music memorable, from Bach to the Beatles. But, says Daniel Levitin, author of "This Is Your Brain on Music: The Science of a Human Obsession" and associate professor at McGill University, there are some individual factors.
"For one thing, the way their songs are performed and produced, quite apart from the underlying composition, gives them an overall catchy sound," says Levitin, a musician and former producer whose forthcoming book, "The World in Six Songs: How the Musical Brain Created Human Nature," further explores the music-mind connection.
The multitracked harmonies of singers Agnetha Faltskog and Frida Lyngstad awaken the part of our brains in which our inner caveman is still enjoying a Paleolithic hootenanny with the rest of his clan.
"If you look at the evolutionary biology of the species and the chemical reactions we have to events in the world, for tens of thousands of years when we as a species heard music we heard groups singing it, not an individual and not an individual standing on a stage," says Levitin. "So the ABBA model of the multiple voices or the Edwin Hawkins Singers singing 'Oh Happy Day' is much closer to stimulating these evolutionary echoes of what music really is, fundamentally, closer than, say, Frank Sinatra or Miley Cyrus."
In other words, if a caveman encased in ice were to be thawed out, revived, and immediately given a full iPod, he would respond more immediately to ABBA or a gospel choir than, say, free jazz. He might eventually dig Ornette Coleman, too, but the presentation of "Knowing Me, Knowing You" would sound more familiar.
The glossy production and compositional patterns of Sweden's fab four also set off different neurological reactions that have medicinal powers. In the most upbeat of the group's songs, like "Money, Money, Money," the simplicity of ABBA's lyrics makes them easy to sing along to. In addition to the fizzy melodies, that participation, says Levitin, gives listeners "an even more powerful hit of happy juice in the brain from dopamine."
With sad songs in general, and in ABBA's case specifically with tracks like the more contemplative "The Winner Takes It All," listeners' brains produce an opposite but equally enjoyable reaction.
"You get the comfort hormone of prolactin when you hear sad music," says Levitin. "That's the same hormone that's released when mothers nurse their babies. It's soothing. And sometimes it's lyrics and sometimes it's music. I think it's most powerful when the two are well-matched and you get what I would call an emergent property where the whole is greater than the sum of its parts."
Structurally, ABBA's songs, like most enduring pop songs, generally offer a straightforward verse-chorus format that satisfies our need for order.
"In Western music we are used to that balance," says Jon Aldrich, associate professor and founder of the songwriting department at Berklee College of Music. To illustrate, Aldrich hums the melody of the sing-songy "shave and a haircut," leaving out the "two bits" conclusion. "Don't you want to hear the rest of it? You want to finish it, so with an eight measure or a 16 measure or even a 12 or a 24, the listeners feel balance and resolution."
And the main piece of the brain puzzle is the simplest of all: repetition, repetition, repetition.
"If you really want to know what makes a song powerful, I would say look at how the memory works," says physiologist Harry Witchel, a senior research fellow at the Medical School of the University of Bristol in the United Kingdom who ranked "Waterloo" as the all-time No. 1 Eurovision song contest winner for the BBC. "Memory works either through strong emotions or through repetition — that's how we normally teach. And ABBA songs allow for both of those things to occur."
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