Do you suffer from earworms? Not Danny Kaye’s charming ‘Inchworm’, nor real worms of any kind, though if you do, I urge you to stop reading this straight away and send off an e-consult request (don’t wait until you can get a GP appointment). The earworms I’m talking about are those relentless little audio snippets that exist solely in your mind’s ear. I’m afraid to say that I do.
They come unbidden and then outstay their welcome. They aren’t unfamiliar, or things I don’t like; in fact are they are often the sounds of some of my favourite artists. And through years of listening to them and in some cases seeing them live, I have committed nearly whole stretches of their music to memory, and can recall them in real time at will. To paraphrase Wordsworth (William or Dorothy, no-one seems quite sure now), my ‘inward ear’ has frequently been ‘the bliss of solitude’. But the trouble with earworms is that they’re self-selecting, and hit ‘play’ without asking me first. The worst offenders seem to be, in ascending order of sainthood, Wilco Johnson/Dr Feelgood, The Blockheads and Rory Gallagher. In particular, I revere the wit and presence (though sadly now the absence) of Ian Dury, fronting the funky precision of The Blockheads; and Gallagher’s sublime genius is in a class of its own. If you haven’t previously come across any of these names, I urge you not to die before you have. I’ll be listening to them for as long as I have ears, but the point is that I’d like to decide when, and if that control is taken away it’s no longer an act of voluntary retrieval, but an earworm.
What then do I do when so visited? Sometimes I try to switch to another channel, to override the worm with something quite different from elsewhere in my inner acoustic archive. This might be something from the Fitzwilliam Virginal Book (caution: you need to stress the first syllable of ‘Virginal’ here, not the second), or Glenn Gould’s account of Bach’s C major prelude. Sometimes it works, sometimes not. Perhaps I need to stifle my natural disdain and cynicism and consider some sort of meditation or ‘mindfulness’ activity, which might help me to focus on a neutral but dominant alternative.
An aunt of mine, enduring towards the end of her life the symptoms of a schizophrenic psychosis which sadly never left her, used to have to hold a ticking clock to her ears to drown out the intrusive and disturbing ‘voices’. Thankfully I’m nowhere near that stage, and most of the time I manage in some way to banish my unwanted visitors in some other way. My question to you is this: if you’re similarly afflicted, what are your earworms, and your strategies for dealing with them?
