Repetition in songs

Music of one kind or another is an important part of people’s daily routines. We

listen to music while reading or driving our cars to work or doing our homework or doing the
chores or going shopping. We may hear a song in the supermarket and we can no longer
escape. Even if we may hate the song at the beginning, we may find ourselves after a couple
of weeks singing it. The pervasive presence of music in our daily lives is indicative of the
pleasure the music provides. According to different researchers music has an impact on brain
functions and on human behaviour including reducing depression, stress or pain.

The question of why people like different types of music has attracted significant
attention from researchers who studied people’s responses to music from a cultural,
cognitive, emotional or physiological perspective. Some elements such as pitch, melody,
harmony or tempo must be taken into account when discussing people’s preferences in the
field of music.

Given the purpose of our study, repetition as another striking feature of music
deserves our attention when analyzing why people feel comfortable and derives pleasure
from listening to music. Despite the fact that critics sometimes make fun of songs because of
their repetitive lyrics, repetition is a fundamental principle in music that connects every
culture on Earth.

Repetition does not only mean that the symphonies or operas or songs we love are
built on certain patterns that repeat – rhythms, drumbeats or harmonic cycles, but also that we
love to listen to the same music without getting bored or tired. Songs that do not use
repetition at all are probably non-existant and listeners take a measure of comfort from
hearing musical elements repeat whether we talk about the song’s form, a motif, lyrics or the
song’s beat and basic rhythm. For instance the chorus of a song is frequently used as a
“hook” to catch the ear of the audience and is repeated regularly throughout a song.
Consequently, the songs that are lyrically more repetitive (for instance, by repeating the
chorus more often), and thus more fluent are generally preferred and adopted more quickly. It
is not possible to measure all the factors that make a song ”catchy”, but certainly repetition is
a key word. According to Andrea Ordanini and Joseph Nunes and Francesca Valsesia1 who
utilized data from Billboard’s Hot 100 singles chart from 1958-2012, there is a strong
correlation between the number of times a song repeated its chorus and the popularity of the
song. More repetitive songs were more likely to chart in the Top 40 and each repetition of the
chorus increased the likelihood a song would make it to the Top 40 by 17 percent. Moreover,
their analysis of #1 hits reveals that increased repetition decreases the time it takes to reach
#1 and also increases the odds of debuting in the Top 40.

Another important research paper in the field that has to be mentioned is On Repeat:
How Music Plays the Mind and The Psychology of Music: A Very Short Introduction. This is
a research realized by Elizabeth Hellmuth Magulis and her team at the Music Cognition Lab,
at Princeton University. The participants in the experiment had to listen to two sets of music.
One set was music by 20th-century composers like Luciano Berio and Elliot Carter —
composers who intentionally avoided repetition in their works. The other set consisted of
digitally altered versions of these composers’ works that were edited to loop and repeat in
places. At the end of the experiment that the listeners reported that they considered the
second version more enjoyable and “more likely to have been composed by a human artist
rather than randomly generated by a computer.” As a conclusion to her study Margulis
mentions that “repetition serves as a handprint of human intent. A phrase that might have
sounded arbitrary the first time might come to sound purposefully shaped and communicative
the second. Repetitiveness actually gives rise to the kind of listening that we think of as
musical. It carves out a familiar, rewarding path in our minds, allowing us at once to
anticipate and participate in each phrase as we listen. That experience of being played by the
music is what creates a sense of shared subjectivity with the sound, and – when we unplug
our earbuds, anyway – with each other, a transcendent connection that lasts at least as long as
a favourite song.”2

Repetition is an important device used by musicians in order to get thier message

across. Some of its major functions are to reinforce meaning, to emphasize certain words (”I
1
Joseph Nunes, Andrea Ordanini, Francesca Valsesia, The Power of Repetition - Repetitive Lyrics in a Song
Increase Processing Fluency and Drives Market Success, https://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?
abstract_id=2938838

2
Elizabeth Hellmuth Magulis, On Repeat: How Music Plays the Mind and The Psychology of Music: A Very
Short Introduction, Oxford University Press
see trees of green /Red roses too/ I see them bloom /For me and you/ And I think to myself /
What a wonderful world/ I see skies of blue ...What a wonderful world”) , to create a contrast
(”If I were a boy/ I think I could understand/ How it feels to love a girl/ I swear I'd be a
better man/ But you're just a boy/ You don't understand/ Yeah, you don't understand, oh/
How it feels to love a girl, someday/ You'll wish you were a better man”) or to create a
certain rhythm (” Lei it snow/Let it snow/Let it snow”).

Music tends to be highly repetitive, both in terms of musical structure and in

terms of listening behavior. Repetition and music are so intimately linked that their
relationship seems almost invisible. No other form of art embraces repetition in such a
passionate manner as music.