Earworms: when you get a song stuck in your head that just won’t leave. When you hear a song on the radio, television, or in a store that just gets stuck and it plays over and over in your head and you don’t know the title it can drive you mad.
Forgetting the title of a song sends you searching down Google Lane. Especially if you do not know the lyrics, or if the part of the song you remembered contains common words, it may be impossible to find your results. I once spent well over an hour trying to find “Video Killed the Radio Star” after I heard it on the radio for the first time.
What if you only have the music part of the song stuck in your head, and not the words? There is a service I discovered on the Internet a while ago that is built to tackle this very problem. Midomi, a website where you sing into your microphone and it attempts to find the song for you. Midomi requires flash, and flash to be configured to access your microphone. It is extremely handy. I gave it a few songs that I did know to try it out, and it was able to find the song I sang. It even picked up my very unique rendition of Lady Gaga’s: Bad Romance. (I swear, the only reason I listen is for the first part of the song — and not because I like it, but because I swear she stole it from someone and I am trying to remember the original song… her music is, in general, terrible, and you should not use your own name excessively in your songs. That is another article for a later date..)
I recommend you bookmark Midomi so that, in the future, you may be able to find a song you have stuck in you head. Midomi is a lot of fun to mess with. It does not require a high quality microphone, or a great singing voice. In fact, you can simply hum into the microphone if you are afraid of criticism from your computer about your singing.
On a side-note: An interesting radio show by RadioLab talks about earworms as well, if you want to learn more. (Or if you want to hear about people who have had much worse!)
Fun Fact: Lady Gaga’s real name is Stefani Joanne Angelina Germanotta. Also, the music video for Video Killed the Radio Star was the first music video ever aired on MTV. In said video, you are taken on a trip to a very interesting recording studio painted in white, where you are greeted by alien-like people in strange costumes who seem to be trapped in glass tubes. Later, various sets of televisions seem to explode out of the floor, leaving the viewer utterly confused. I wonder what Freud would say.
