Abstract
Although there has been some empirical research on earworms, songs that become caught and replayed in one’s
memory over and over again, there has been surprisingly
little empirical research on the more general concept of the
musical hook, the most salient moment in a piece of music, or the even more general concept of what may make
music ‘catchy’. Almost by definition, people like catchy
music, and thus this question is a natural candidate for approaching with ‘gamification’. We present the design of
Hooked, a game we are using to study musical catchiness,
as well as the theories underlying its design and the results
of a pilot study we undertook to check its scientific validity.
We found significant di↵erences in time to recall pieces of
music across di↵erent segments, identified parameters for
making recall tasks more or less challenging, and found that
players are not as reliable as one might expect at predicting
their own recall performance.
memory over and over again, there has been surprisingly
little empirical research on the more general concept of the
musical hook, the most salient moment in a piece of music, or the even more general concept of what may make
music ‘catchy’. Almost by definition, people like catchy
music, and thus this question is a natural candidate for approaching with ‘gamification’. We present the design of
Hooked, a game we are using to study musical catchiness,
as well as the theories underlying its design and the results
of a pilot study we undertook to check its scientific validity.
We found significant di↵erences in time to recall pieces of
music across di↵erent segments, identified parameters for
making recall tasks more or less challenging, and found that
players are not as reliable as one might expect at predicting
their own recall performance.
| Original language | English |
|---|---|
| Title of host publication | Proceedings of the 14th Society of Music Information Retrieval Conference (ISMIR) |
| Publication status | Published - 2013 |