Smartphones make this possible. Not just as a useful recording device: I could do that just as easily with a pad and pencil. But more often than not, the earworm does not present at the beginning of the song, or at a convenient chorus, or anywhere that might be helpful in identifying it. It’s simply a familiar song, one I’ve heard before, but what is its name?

Google — and all those lyrics database clickwhore sites — is very helpful in serving up possible answers to snatches of lyrics. Sometimes I was able to put a name to a song that I’d heard as a child and never knew what it was called. (For literally decades I thought that the name and chorus in the song “99” by Toto was “Saturday Night”. It took me thirty minutes of highly creative Google searching to finally figure it out. And, much to my surprise, I discovered that the song was inspired by the early George Lucas experimental film “THX-1388”. LOL.) The sites that can identify songs from snatches of sung melody were also indispensible for identifying classical songs that don’t have any lyrics to search for – although then there’s the problem of actually singing on key.

Another specific reason for the importance of the song ID is the song authorship. There might be multiple songs by the same name, so singling out the proper one is important. But just as important is identifying the songwriter responsible for crafting the lyric or the melody that qualified as an earworm in the first place. And sometimes the person who wrote it or performed it was not the person you had assumed all along. For pop hits, perhaps it’s not all that important to list the songwriter – although some people don’t realize “Blinded By The Light” was written for Manfred Mann’s Earth Band by Bruce Springsteen. But for something like “If I Only Had a Brain” from “The Wizard of Oz”, some might know that Ray Bolger sang it, but nobody knows that Harold Arlen and E.Y. Harburg actually wrote it. And that’s an interesting fact.

One thing to note: an earworm is not an endorsement. These are not a “favorites” setlist. Earworms are not regulated by popularity. This is a sonic call-and-response from my subconscious, my auditory processing areas, and my language centers. Many of these songs would warrant an immediate change in station if one came on the radio. One of the reasons I started coding the earworms was because I was surprised to find that most earworms seemed to be coming from contextual suggestions or descriptive phrases in my immediate environment, not through actual hearing or musical similarity to an earlier earworm. I also wanted some way of flagging to (any) followers of the Twitter feed that good Lord, no, I don’t actually like that song!

So read, enjoy – and maybe get a couple of earworms stuck in your own head!