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First, we asked you to tell us what song gets stuck in your head. Then, we asked you how you got it out. Finally, we made a podcast. Thank you to everyone who called in, shared their secret techniques, and sang without shame.
Duration
8m
Broadcast on
17 Jun 2008
Audio Format
other

First, we asked you to tell us what song gets stuck in your head. Then, we asked you how you got it out. Finally, we made a podcast. Thank you to everyone who called in, shared their secret techniques, and sang without shame.


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WNYC Studios is supported by ODU. When you buy business software from lots of vendors, the costs add up and it gets complicated and confusing. ODU solves this. It's a single company that sells a suite of enterprise apps that handles everything from accounting to inventory to sales. ODU is all connected on a single platform in a simple and affordable way. You can save money without missing out on the features you need. Check out ODU at ODOO.com. That's ODOO.com. Everyone, Jad here. This is RadioLab, the podcast, and today's subject is earworms. Earworms, like what we did in season four for the pop music show. You may remember that. Well, we did a larger thing about people who have really, really bad earworms, but we all have songs that get stuck in our head. So what we did was we put a message onto the blog asking you to call us up on our voicemail, leave us a message, saying, "What are your stickiest songs?" And more importantly, when they get stuck, how do you unstick them? What are your techniques for getting them out? And we got great responses. So we thought on this little podcast, we would put forward some of those responses. The world's stickiest songs as defined by you, our panel of experts, and some very, very clever solutions for how to unstick them. My earworm song is Rocket Man, I find that when I'm walking down the street, the speed that I walk at matches the tempo of the song. So it's like, step, step, step, and I think it's going to be a long, long time. You know, when I'm walking down a crowded street or sitting on the subway or something, it just kind of pops in there as a way to think that, "Well, I'm here, but I'm not really here because I'm a Rocket Man." ♪ It's beginning to look a lot like me ♪ ♪ And it's everywhere you go ♪ ♪ Get out of it ♪ ♪ Hit me baby one more time ♪ I think the world's stickiest song is "Don't Stop Believing" by Jeremy. Maybe I'll sing it for you. I think I'm gonna forgive you. So I keep a tune for a time, I think it's everybody. ♪ Keep those on and on and on and on ♪ ♪ Strangers waiting ♪ You know, an interesting aside is that a lot of the people who called us up and sang on the voicemail actually sang exactly on pitch, and the music wasn't there in the background. So there seems to be some kind of, you know, perfect pitch out there in the world when it comes to earworms. In any case, how to get them out, that's what we really want to talk about right now. Earworm removal techniques, I'm gonna present to you three of the ones that you presented to us. The first one, which was by far the most commonly suggested, was to simply replace the song. And some other song that's louder, funky, or something-er, and stick it in your earholes.

Transcription truncated.

First, we asked you to tell us what song gets stuck in your head. Then, we asked you how you got it out. Finally, we made a podcast. Thank you to everyone who called in, shared their secret techniques, and sang without shame.