We are more intuitive and we've evolved to focus on the human voice. “ theory is that it's simply that the human voice compels us more. So you are kind of almost rehearsing and practising it,” says Loveday. And it's partly because you can, in your minds, sing it back. “We remember tunes that are sung better than tunes that are played. Songs in general tend to be catchier than instrumental music, just because of the way our brains are built. A listener can join in with the chorus easily enough after only a few verses. Wellerman has a call-and-response structure, with a soloist singing the verses, and the rest of the group joining in for the chorus – which comes around plenty of times in the song. “Anything that is repeated like a mantra just kind of gets stuck.” “Anything where you've got a repeated theme that goes round and round and round and it's very easy to sing back,” Loveday says. “Something that doesn't jump about too much but follows a nice line – those seem to be the things that stick in our mind most.” In the case of Wellerman, the chorus stays within one octave, so most people could sing it comfortably without stretching their range. “So if we can if we can articulate it in our heads, so if we can kind of almost hum it internally or mouth the words, then we may be more likely to remember it better. The easier the tune is to pick up, Loveday says, the more likely it is to get stuck in our heads. That said, there are a few things that all good earworms have in common. The jury is still out on what exactly makes a song catchy. And also in terms of a sea shanty, it kind of matches the environment that you're in, right?” Why is Wellerman so catchy? “And it does that kind of with this very, very consistent rhythm, but also with sort of melodic lines that tend to go up and down and match the activity that you’re doing. It's taking you away and it's bringing you back and it's taking you away and it's bringing you back. “What you have with sea shanties is something that that is almost moving you backwards and forwards in a very rhythmic sense. But you also have a sense of tension sometimes when something feels like it hasn't got home. “So you sometimes in music have a sense of going home when something resolves. “We know from other research that people use music almost as a metaphor for something,” she adds. The music rises with an upward movement, and falls with a downward one. “I think it's the fact that they tend to have these lifting, lilting melodies that go up and they tend to match the actual physical action you're doing,” Loveday says.
The musical element helped people to bond and work better as a team, Loveday says. A simple chant of ‘heave-ho’ or ‘one, two, three’ could keep people in time.
Part of what makes work songs useful is simply keeping everyone in time with each other: everyone pulls on the rope to the beat of the music, and the work becomes physically much easier.īut it’s not just that. “The melody and the rhythm are designed to match the activities that are going on.” Why do work songs help with hard labour? “They're very, very repetitive and fairly upbeat, uplifting tunes and melodies that people can very quickly join and sing together,” says Loveday. Sea shanties are work songs that were created by sailors aboard merchant ships, usually sung in accompaniment of hard labour such as hoisting the sails or raising the anchor. So we spoke to Prof Catherine Loveday, a neuropsychologist who specialises in music at the University of Westminster. Naturally, we here at BBC Science Focus wanted to know what it was about sea shanties that makes them so catchy.
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