Earworm bug is music to ears
Harvinder Khetal
As I was about to reach office the other morning, FM radio started playing an evergreen melody, one of my favourite numbers. At the parking lot, the last chorus was petering out. I made an exaggeratedly slow act of picking the bag and sorting the dashboard. A couple of minutes later, I found my colleague, who had also arrived just then, humming the same tune. I smiled to myself. Old melodies are everybody’s favourite. The day passed with the lyrics replaying in my ears and head.
A catchy piece of music that continually repeats through one’s mind long after it is no longer playing is called an earworm or brainworm. The phenomenon is common. It is different from palinacousis, a rare medical condition caused by damage to the brain that results in auditory hallucinations.
This friendly bug that leads to the stuck song syndrome generally sets the tone for the mood of the day. For example, that day as usual, I was watching TV in office to keep up with the news. It beamed a contrasting picture: the deplorable cacophony caused by our honourable MPs outshouting each other in Parliament. A cacophony is a harsh discordant mixture of sounds. The jarring notes struck by them were no better than my little niece’s musical toy gone haywire a couple of years back. Insisting on playing the grating nursery rhymes at top volume, amid screams, the toddler was too innocent to comprehend that it was hard to maintain mental harmony in that din. But our great MPs putting up the noisy winter show should know better. Thankfully, the musical strains of the earworm playing in my ear countered their cacophonous pitch.
But god forbid, if you are stuck with some song that you would rather be better off without. It is not quite uncommon to be tormented with the ringing in our ears of some unimpressive snatches of a song. Then this famous gag on singers could fall on us:
What’s the difference between a singer and a terrorist?
You can negotiate with a terrorist.
Cacophony is employed in language as well, as a literary device to present dreadful or distasteful situations. The term refers to the use of words with sharp, harsh, hissing and unmelodious sounds, primarily those of consonants, to achieve desired results. Its opposite is euphony, which is the use of words having pleasant and harmonious effects. The language of Shakespeare is a great example of euphony. John Keats’ Ode to Autumn also qualifies.
Lewis Carroll makes abundant use of cacophonic words in the nonsense poem Jabberwocky in his children’s classic novel Through the Looking-Glass, and What Alice Found There. After reading the poem, Alice, the main character, gives her impression that reflects clearly the purpose of the poem. She says:
“Somehow it seems to fill my head with ideas — only I don’t exactly know what they are! However, somebody killed something: that’s clear, at any rate.”
This earworm also reminds me of that poor delusional uncle who is the butt of every family’s joke:
What is the difference between a singer and a chimpanzee?
It’s scientifically proven that chimpanzees are able to communicate with humans.
Thankfully, that day, the earworm that lodged itself in my brain was in its soft romantic avataar: “Jhilmil sitaron ka aangan hoga...”
