In this lesson
Why a song grows on you with repeated plays
Liking for a new track often climbs over everyday plays, and remembering a hook is a separate thing from liking it. What the studies found, and how to test a demo.
· 8 min read · Lesson 7 of 14 in Music Psychology
In short
- Judge a new idea after several plays in the background, because liking for unfamiliar music tends to keep rising over everyday listening.
- Weigh a cold reaction by how well the listener knows the style, since familiarity with the style was the strongest predictor of liking in a four-week study.
- Ask "have you heard this?" and "do you want it again?" as separate questions, because recognition and liking respond to exposure differently.
In this lesson (8)
The friend who changed their mind
You send a new instrumental to a friend who mostly listens to rap. The reply is "it's fine, a bit busy." Three weeks later the track has been playing in the background of your shared room most afternoons, and the same friend asks what it is called and whether it is finished. It is the same file you sent the first time.
Memory misleads in a different way. You play two hooks to a few people and ask which one they remember. Hook A wins, so you assume it is the one they like, and build the chorus on it.
Why it matters
First reactions and memory tests mislead
Most demo feedback rests on two habits. The first is treating one cold listen as the verdict on a track. The second is treating "which one stuck?" as a vote for the better idea. Research on repeated listening gives reasons to doubt both. Liking for unfamiliar music tends to climb over repeated everyday plays, and how much a listener remembers a piece and how much they like it are separate measurements that respond to exposure in different ways.
The science
Exposure, style history and two kinds of memory
Zajonc (1968) described the : repeated exposure alone can make people like a stimulus more. The lesson on mixing while attached to the demo covers how it traps you on your own rough mix, and the one on hooks that wear out covers how liking can rise and then fall when people listen closely.
Madison and Schiölde (2017) ran a long test outside the lab. Fifteen adults received 40 instrumental excerpts, 38 to 75 seconds long, drawn from pop, rock, jazz and world-music records, none of which they had heard before. Each excerpt played about once a day for four weeks, 28 times in all, and most listening happened while people did chores, ate, drove or worked. Experts had sorted the excerpts into four levels of complexity. Liking rose with plays at every level, from the simplest excerpts to the most complex, with no rise and fall. The strongest predictor of liking was familiarity with the style: how much listeners said, on the first day, that they listen to music like each excerpt. That is the same learned style knowledge that decides what sounds surprising.
The study has limits. Fifteen people is a small sample. They were recruited through one author's contacts among music professionals, they were more involved with music than most people, and the excerpts came from the authors' own record collections. Four listeners showed a small dip late in the series, almost all of it in the two simplest levels, though none of those dips was statistically reliable. The study speaks to half-attentive everyday listening and says little about one focused A/B in your studio.
Remembering and liking also come apart. Peretz, Gaudreau and Bonnel (1998) played listeners a set of familiar and unfamiliar melodies, then mixed them with new ones at test. Half the listeners rated how much they liked each melody. The other half said whether they had heard it before. Exposure raised liking for the unfamiliar melodies. The recognition effect lasted longer over delays than the liking effect. Changing the instrument between the first hearing and the test, or changing what listeners did while they first heard the melodies, had a marked effect on recognition and little effect on liking. The authors read this as two forms of memory: an explicit one you can report, and an implicit one that shows up as preference.
Green and colleagues (2012) found a similar split in a scanner study. Twenty-one non-musicians heard unfamiliar 13-second melodies either never, 2, 8 or 32 times, all in one session of about an hour, while they listened for an occasional out-of-tune note. Recognition rose at every step. Liking rose modestly, and only 32 plays against none was a reliable difference. Frontal and parietal areas that the authors tie to memory retrieval were more active for well-known melodies even while people were only judging liking, which the authors take as a sign that liking leans on memory. They used an uncorrected statistical threshold, so treat the brain result as preliminary.
For a producer, two things follow. A listener's first reaction partly measures their history with the style. And a hook can become easy to recognize after a few plays while liking for it has barely moved.
Try it
A ten-day listening log
0 of 7 steps done
One person's log proves nothing general, but it shows how far your own first reaction moved, and whether the hook people recall is the one they rate highest.
Common mistake
The cold listen as a verdict
After one reaction, you bin or simplify an idea, especially if it comes from someone who does not listen to that style. In the Madison and Schiölde data, familiarity with the style counted for more than the music's complexity, and the more complex excerpts were, if anything, liked slightly more. Before you strip a dense arrangement, get a reaction from someone who knows the genre, or let the track play a few more times in the background.
The second mistake is asking "which one do you remember?" and counting the answer as a vote. Recall tells you the hook got into memory. Whether the listener wants it again is a different question, and it deserves its own pass.
Repetition does not rescue everything either. Under close, attentive listening a simple loop can wear out, which is the point of the hook lesson.
Takeaway
Give it plays, then ask two questions
Do not decide on a new idea from one focused listen. Let it play in the background for a few days, then judge it again. When you test with other people, note what they usually listen to, and ask whether they have heard the hook and whether they want it again as two separate questions. A track that the right listeners like more on the fifth play is worth finishing, even if the first reaction was a shrug.
Mere exposure effect
People tend to like something more the more often they have encountered it, even without noticing. It is one reason a demo you have looped for weeks can sound right when it is not.
Timbre
What lets you tell two sounds apart at the same pitch and level: the balance of harmonics and noise, and how they change over time.
3 questions
Check yourself
Sources
Show all 4Hide sources
- Green, A. C., Bærentsen, K. B., Stødkilde-Jørgensen, H., Roepstorff, A., & Vuust, P. (2012). Listen, learn, like! Dorsolateral prefrontal cortex involved in the mere exposure effect in music. Neurology Research International, 2012, 846270.
- Madison, G., & Schiölde, G. (2017). Repeated listening increases the liking for music regardless of its complexity: Implications for the appreciation and aesthetics of music. Frontiers in Neuroscience, 11, 147.
- Peretz, I., Gaudreau, D., & Bonnel, A.-M. (1998). Exposure effects on music preference and recognition. Memory & Cognition, 26(5), 884-902.
- Zajonc, R. B. (1968). Attitudinal effects of mere exposure. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology Monograph Supplement, 9(2, Pt. 2), 1-27.
Next lesson · 8 of 14
Why repeated speech starts to sound like songLoop a spoken phrase and it can start to sound sung, with no change to the audio. What makes a phrase turn, who hears it, and how to mine it for a hook.
Written by Virzy Guns
Songwriter and producer, founder of Virzy Guns Production. Now building HealingWave.