“Every Little Bit Hurts” – Brenda Holloway This funky number, played by a bunch of high school students no less, is a fantastic feel-good and move-your-feet kind of song. Rex, it’s hard to rank an amazing band like Blur this low on a ranked list, but this song is really kind of a throwaway from the group's album Modern Life Is Rubbish and serves as an intermission on the album in Baby Driver, the buildup of sound is used well, however. He lives in Bengaluru, and listens to music nearly all his waking hours."Easy" is a decent enough cover of The Commodores classic (which also appears in the movie), but it’s not deserving of being higher on this list of great songs. Thejaswi Udupa is a director of product management at RoofandFloor. Maybe if the internet ever adopts an anthem, they can go for ‘Baby Shark’. While the evocative familiarity of your own country’s anthem is obvious enough, sports fans will often find the anthems of their favourite teams or players very catchy.Īsk any Michael Schumacher fan, and it is very likely that they can competently hum both the German (for he was German) and Italian (for Ferrari, his team, was Italian) national anthems, for they were played every time he won a race.
Something similar used to happen when a friend was teaching me how to play tunes on a keyboard, and in my attempt to play the opening riff of ‘Breaking the Law’ by Judas Priest, I would segue into the typical tune used while chanting the Vishnu Sahasranamam.Īlso Read: In the Guise of Protest Music, Assamese Artists Churn out Hate SpeechĪshley pointed out another set of tunes that play on the ability of evocative familiarity to make catchy music are various national anthems across the world. Because I have been familiar with that tune for many years now and is a personal favourite, very often when I try to hum ‘Baby Shark’, my mind automatically segues into the Dvorak composition. They did not have the rights to use the Jaws theme, so they instead used something from classical music that sounded similar, the opening bars of Dvorak’s ‘Symphony No 9’, or the ‘New World Symphony’ as it is better known.
Pinkfong’s version of ‘Baby Shark’ starts with bars that are meant to be reminiscent of the opening theme of the movie Jaws, thus immediately bringing to mind sharks.Ī still from the movie Jaws.
And if the familiar bit of the music has the ability to evoke an image or a feeling, even better. This sense of familiarity is another big factor in making a song catchy. People, having heard that motif before in association with the character, are able to appreciate the narrative that the music conveys in a clearer fashion. Whenever the character appears, or their appearance has to be foreshadowed, the motif plays. A major lift essentially refers to a transition from a minor chord to a major chord, which as the name implies, has the effect of uplifting the mood of the listener.Īnother standard technique that composers used, especially in operas, was to associate a musical motif with each character.
Berty Ashley, scientist and musician, also explained how a lot of catchy tunes including ‘Baby Shark’ feature what is called as the “major lift”. So while you are repeating the same melody in each verse, the change in voice for baby shark, mama shark, papa shark, grandma shark, keeps it interesting and catchy. ‘Baby Shark’ achieves this through clever voice modulation thanks to the need of enacting each member of the shark family. There needs to be an added layer of either variation with each iteration, like playing around with the tempo, or the other instruments and vocals that adjoin the melody need to be doing interesting things with each repetition.Īlso Read: How Shakespeare Used Music to Tell Stories
Otherwise a metronome is enough to produce the catchiest tune ever. However, just unvarying repetition is not enough. Or ‘In the Hall of the Mountain King’ from Edvard Grieg’s Peer Gynt suite. For example, the Toreador’s Song in Bizet’s opera, ‘Carmen’. So even the most complex works of classical music would have sections that were meant to be catchier than the rest. Composers have always known that a recurring rhythmic or melodic pattern is rather important in making sure that their tunes are memorable. If you break the melody of ‘Baby Shark’ down, you will be presented with a set of repeating notes (D-E G GG GG GG), which in turn repeat for each verse.Ī very basic component of music, the riff, or ostinato if you want to borrow a term from classical music, is all about repetition. This theory has many supporters including neuroscientist Oliver Sacks, who says as much in his book Musicophilia, which attempts to understand how music works on the brain. The biggest factor that determines how catchy a song is repetition.