The Science Behind the Song Stuck in Your Head is being studied by a marketing teacher (warning: I think this means the results will be used to sell you more things!). He surveyed 1,000 students at four universities and gathered characteristics of the stickiest songs.
Excessive repetitiveness, musical simplicity, and incongruity are some of the factors common the songs you can’t get out of your head. The article also describes the syndrome of auditory hallucinations which is a rare condition whose sufferers are often elderly and partially deaf. In the student survey, the sticky songs that prevailed were often from childhood. One guy claimed that a tune from a videogame had been playing in his head “since 1986.” Sometimes I remember the sound of Pac-Man swallowing dots, but I don’t think that’s a tune.