Jingles: The Tiny Tunes That Colonize Your Brain
From ancient chants to digital sonic logos, discover the surprising science of how catchy melodies shape our memory, culture, and buying habits.
ReadyIt was 1929, and a breakfast cereal was dying. Sales for Wheaties were so dismal that executives at General Mills had drawn up the paperwork to discontinue it. In a last-ditch effort, they had aired a simple song on the radio three years earlier, a tune performed by a barbershop quartet. It was a Hail Mary pass made of music.
Across the decades, another jingle became so universally beloved that people started calling radio stations to request it—not the pop song of the day, but a commercial for a soft drink. The demand grew so immense that its advertising elements were stripped away, and it was re-recorded as a non-commercial pop hit that soared up charts worldwide.
These aren't marketing fables. They are evidence of the peculiar, potent power of the jingle—a slice of sound so meticulously engineered that it can rescue a failing brand, unite a global audience, and embed itself in our memory for a lifetime, whether we want it to or not.
The Sound of Selling Itself
The word jingle is a marvel of onomatopoeia; it sounds like what it is. It clinks into English in the late 14th century as the verb gingeln, a word meant to capture the light, repetitive, metallic sound of small bells or coins in a pocket. It was a sound that demanded, however gently, to be noticed.
By the 1590s, the sound became a noun, a jingle. But it didn’t stay confined to metal. A century later, it had leaped from the literal to the literary, describing a “catchy array of words in prose or verse.” The core idea remained: a pleasing, repetitive pattern that sticks.
It wasn’t until 1930 that the word found its ultimate calling, officially recorded as meaning “a song in an advertisement.” The journey was complete. A word born from the sound of clinking coins had become the very tool used to make them clink in the cash register.
From Ancient Chants to Anthems of Commerce
Before a jingle ever sold soap, its ancestors were preserving civilizations. The use of rhythm and rhyme to make information unforgettable is a technique as old as memory itself. This is the power of the oral tradition, where entire histories, legal codes, and epic poems were entrusted not to paper, but to the patterned cadence of the human voice.
In pre-literate societies, this wasn't art for art's sake; it was a survival technology. West African Griots, hereditary storytellers and musicians, serve as living libraries, their songs preserving genealogies and histories with astonishing accuracy. To lose a Griot, the saying goes, is to burn a library. Ancient Polynesian navigators memorized thousands of miles of open ocean—star paths, wave patterns, bird migrations—by encoding the data into chants. The rhythm wasn't just pleasant; it was the scaffold that held their world together.
The brain is built for this. Rhythmic language engages motor and emotional centers that simple speech doesn't touch, strengthening neural pathways and making the embedded information incredibly resilient. This deep, ancient wiring for musical memory is the bedrock on which the modern jingle was built.
The commercial application began modestly. Medieval street vendors in London had their musical cries: “One-a-penny, two-a-penny, hot cross buns!” By the 16th century, musicians were hired to sing the praises of the local butcher. But the true broadcast jingle was a child of radio.
On Christmas Eve, 1926, a barbershop quartet sang a simple tune for Wheaties cereal on a Minneapolis station. “Have you tried Wheaties? They're whole wheat with all of the bran.” The effect was seismic. While the rest of the country ignored the cereal, sales in the Minneapolis-St. Paul market skyrocketed. Of 53,000 cases sold, 40,000 were in that single region. The jingle didn't just boost sales; it saved the brand from extinction.
The golden age had begun. The 1944 Chiquita Banana jingle was an instructional manual set to a calypso beat, teaching Americans how to ripen a fruit made precious by wartime shipping. At its peak, it aired 376 times a day. The formula was set: a simple hook, relentless repetition, and a direct line into the consumer’s brain.
The Brain's Uninvited Playlist
A jingle is not just a song. It is a piece of cognitive engineering designed to become an earworm, or what neuroscientists call Involuntary Musical Imagery (INMI). It’s a masterful exploitation of our neural architecture.
It zeroes in on what psychologists Alan Baddeley and Graham Hitch called the phonological loop. Think of it as a short-term memory system with two parts: an “inner ear” that briefly stores sound and an “inner voice” that silently rehearses it. The simple, repetitive structure of a jingle is perfect fuel for this loop, making it easy to rehearse and hard to forget.
But memory isn't just repetition; it's emotion. A good jingle doesn't just enter your ears; it recruits your amygdala, the brain's emotional switchboard. The pleasure or nostalgia it evokes acts like a chemical highlighter, telling your brain, “This is important. Save it.” This is why a jingle from your childhood can feel as vivid as a core memory.
For most, this process is purely auditory. But for a fascinating fraction of the population, the experience is far richer. For individuals with synesthesia, a jingle isn't just heard; it's seen or felt. Derived from the Greek for “sensation-together,” synesthesia is a neurological phenomenon where stimulating one sensory pathway triggers an involuntary experience in another. The most common form relevant here is chromesthesia, where sounds evoke an experience of color.
For a synesthete like the musician Pharrell Williams, the bright melody of the Oscar Mayer jingle might not just be a sound, but a simultaneous, unbidden burst of shimmering yellow and orange. The deep tones of the Nationwide jingle might paint a wash of indigo in their mind’s eye. The leading theory, cross-activation, suggests that in synesthetes, the neural pathways between sensory regions—like the auditory cortex and the visual color-processing area V4—are more interconnected than in the typical brain. A jingle, for them, becomes a private light show, a layer of perception its creators never intended.
Of course, for the rest of us, the experience can be less than magical. When the phonological loop becomes a prison, the jingle becomes a tormentor. This is the “cognitive itch,” a term from marketing professor Dr. James Kellaris describing the maddening persistence of an earworm. Your brain detects an unresolved musical pattern and tries to “scratch” the itch by replaying it, seeking a sense of completion it never finds. This may be related to the Zeigarnik effect, our tendency to remember unfinished tasks more than completed ones. The jingle is a task your brain can’t stop trying to finish.
Neurologist Oliver Sacks observed that earworms are “out of control and can become quite unpleasant and intrusive.” The harder you try to suppress one, the more it persists—a cruel trick of the mind known as ironic process theory. The very mechanism that makes a jingle an effective ad is the same one that can turn it into a tiny, personalized psychological torture device.
The Hooks We Can't Forget
The history of advertising is littered with jingles that achieved a kind of cultural immortality. After the Wheaties quartet saved a brand, the floodgates opened. Oscar Mayer built an empire on simple desire, first with 1965’s “I wish I were an Oscar Mayer wiener,” and later with the unforgettable spelling lesson: “My bologna has a first name, it’s O-S-C-A-R…”
In 1971, McDonald’s didn’t just sell burgers; they sold respite with “You Deserve a Break Today,” a campaign so effective it became one of Ad Age's best of the century. That same year, a young Barry Manilow, years before “Mandy,” composed a three-note melody of reassurance that has now been a sonic bedrock for over five decades: “Like a Good Neighbor, State Farm is There.”
But the undisputed champion of 1971 was Coca-Cola. Their jingle, “I’d Like to Buy the World a Coke,” featuring a multinational chorus on an Italian hilltop, was more than an ad; it was a cultural event. It captured a hopeful, post-60s zeitgeist so perfectly that it transcended commerce. Retooled as “I’d Like to Teach the World to Sing” by The Hillside Singers, it became a global pop sensation.
Even in our fragmented media landscape, the principle endures. The highly repetitive, almost brutishly simple jingle for The Barnes Firm injury attorneys—“Call 1-800-8-Million”—is engineered for a single purpose: to be the first name that surfaces in your brain after the shock of a car accident. It’s not artful, but it’s a ruthlessly effective tool for cognitive availability.
Our Shared Cultural Soundtrack
Jingles do more than sell. They become a kind of cultural connective tissue, an auditory shorthand that binds generations. They are some of our first encounters with music, built from the same simple, memorable blocks as the nursery rhymes of our infancy.
Hearing a jingle from thirty years ago can trigger a cascade of autobiographical memories, a phenomenon known as nostalgia. The brain doesn’t just recall the tune; it recalls the shag carpet you were sitting on, the smell of your mother’s cooking, the specific feeling of being a kid on a Saturday morning. Brands leverage this by re-releasing classic jingles, knowing the melody is a key that unlocks a powerful, positive emotional state.
The line between jingle and popular music has always been porous. Bob Seger’s “Like a Rock” became so fused with Chevy trucks that for many, one is inseparable from the other. The cross-pollination runs deep, embedding these commercial artifacts into the soundtrack of our lives.
The Jingle in Your Pocket
For a while, it seemed the classic jingle was fading, replaced by licensed pop songs. But it didn't die; it evolved. It atomized. In an age of six-second TikTok videos and voice-activated smart speakers, the 30-second song is an eternity. The jingle has mutated into the sonic logo.
This is the jingle’s digital descendant, stripped down to its barest essence: a short, distinctive, non-lyrical sound designed for instant recognition. The three-second “ta-dum” that precedes a Netflix show is perhaps the most famous example. Crafted by Oscar-winning sound designer Lon Bender, it’s a micro-jingle engineered to build anticipation and signal a cinematic experience. It is so ingrained in our culture that it’s become a meme unto itself.
Mastercard’s six-note melody, launched in 2019, is another masterpiece of the form. It’s a sound of confirmation and security, heard at checkout, in apps, and online. It’s versatile enough to be rendered in hundreds of styles, from a simple piano plink to a full orchestral swell, but the melodic DNA remains constant. These audio logos are crucial in a world where we interact with brands without a screen. When you ask Alexa to order something, the sonic logo is the only branding you might experience.
This evolution is the future: sound as pure identity. AI tools are already emerging that can analyze and optimize these audio assets, scientifically refining them for maximum cognitive impact. The jingle isn’t gone. It’s more pervasive than ever, hiding in plain sight, in the pings and chimes that texture our digital lives.
That Lingering Tune
So we return to that dying cereal and that world-uniting soft drink. We now see it wasn’t an accident. The Wheaties jingle wasn’t just a pleasant tune; it was a perfectly crafted key that unlocked the phonological loop in the minds of thousands of Minnesotans, rehearsing itself into their memory until the brand became unforgettable.
The Coca-Cola song wasn’t just a good melody; it was a masterstroke of emotional engineering, tapping into a universal yearning for harmony and connecting that feeling, inextricably, to a bottle of soda. Its leap to the pop charts was simply a recognition of the powerful psychological machinery at its core.
The jingle is a testament to a fundamental truth: the shortest path to the wallet often runs directly through the auditory cortex. It is a commercial whisper that, once heard, can echo for a lifetime.
[SOUND of a gentle, ambient intro melody that fades after a few seconds] [CAST] HOST: Dr. Caroline Wallis (the permanent host — see her bio) EXPERT: Dr. Aris Thorne, Professor of Auditory Cognition and Mnemonic Architecture at MIT Media Lab. Quietly intense, he hears the world in textures and shapes. EVERYBODY: Brenda Wallis, Caroline's mother, a retired CPA. Practical and no-nonsense, she views the world through the lens of a balance sheet. [/CAST] [CAROLINE]: In 1929, a breakfast cereal was on the brink of death. Sales for Wheaties were so low, the folks at General Mills had basically written the obituary. But three years earlier, they’d tried something… odd. They paid a barbershop quartet to sing a little song on the radio. It was a Hail Mary, thrown into the airwaves. [CAROLINE]: Fast forward to 1971. Radio stations are getting flooded with calls from people requesting a song. Not the Beatles, not the Stones. A commercial for Coca-Cola. A jingle so popular, it had to be scrubbed of its brand, re-recorded, and released as a pop song that then topped charts around the world. [CAROLINE]: These aren't just cute stories. They're proof of the weird, almost startling power of the jingle. A tiny slice of music engineered to do one thing: get inside your head and refuse to leave. Today on The Grand Unified Theory of X, we’re looking at the irresistible, sometimes infuriating, science of the jingle. And — and stick with me here — we have some very special guests. First, from the MIT Media Lab, a man who thinks more deeply about sound than anyone I know, Dr. Aris Thorne. Welcome, Aris. [ARIS]: Thank you, Caroline. It’s a pleasure. The air in this studio has a very… rounded acoustic profile. It’s lovely. [CAROLINE]: [Laughs a half-second too early] I will take that compliment. And, in a surprise visit, the woman who taught me the importance of a well-organized bookshelf and a balanced checkbook, my mother, Brenda Wallis. [BRENDA]: Hello, dear. I was just in the neighborhood. Though I will say, the return on investment for all this foam on the walls seems questionable. [CAROLINE]: See? This is going to be fun. Okay so, let's start where I always love to start. The word itself. Jingle. [TIMING: ~2:10] [CAROLINE]: It’s onomatopoeia, right? It sounds like what it is. It shows up in the late 14th century as the verb ‘gingeln,’ which meant to make a light, tinkling, metallic sound. Like keys in a pocket. [BRENDA]: Or coins. The sound of commerce. [CAROLINE]: Exactly! And by the 1600s, it had jumped from a literal sound to a literary idea: a 'catchy array of words.' It already had the idea of 'stickiness' baked right into it. But it took until 1930 for it to officially mean 'a song in an advertisement.' The word literally followed the money. [BRENDA]: As most sensible things do. [TIMING: ~3:00] [CAROLINE]: But Aris, using music to remember things is much, much older than radio, isn't it? It feels like jingles are just the commercial version of a very ancient human technology. [ARIS]: That's precisely right. Before we ever sold a product with a song, we were preserving entire cultures with them. You're talking about the oral tradition. In societies without writing, rhythm and melody weren't entertainment; they were data storage. [CAROLINE]: Like a hard drive made of music. [ARIS]: Exactly. [A quiet hum as he gathers his thoughts] Think of the Griots in West Africa. They're hereditary musicians and storytellers who hold the genealogies and histories of their people. An epic poem they recite isn't just a story; it's a historical record, with the meter and rhyme acting as error-correction. You can't easily change a line without breaking the pattern. Or consider ancient Polynesian navigators—they memorized complex star charts and wave patterns by encoding them into chants. The rhythm was the map. The brain is simply wired to retain patterned, melodic information far more robustly than dry, unstructured data. [BRENDA]: So it's like a mnemonic device? Like the one I used to teach you for the number of days in the months? [ARIS]: It is the ancestor of all mnemonic devices. The jingle just takes that powerful, ancient neural pathway and uses it to make you remember you're low on fabric softener. The mechanism is the same. [CAROLINE]: And the commercial version of that really exploded with radio. That Wheaties jingle in 1926... what it did was almost unbelievable. [ARIS]: It was a paradigm shift. General Mills saw that in the one market where the jingle aired—Minneapolis-St. Paul—sales were astronomical. Forty thousand of the fifty-three thousand cases sold nationwide were right there. It was proof of concept on a massive scale. The jingle wasn't just advertising; it was a direct, measurable driver of sales. It demonstrated that you could implant a brand into the public consciousness through the ear. [TIMING: ~5:45] [CAROLINE]: Okay so, let's get into the brain science, because this is where it gets really fascinating. We've all had a song stuck in our head. The scientific term is 'Involuntary Musical Imagery,' or INMI, but we all know it as an earworm. Aris, jingles are basically purpose-built earworms, right? [ARIS]: They are. They are perfectly engineered to exploit a specific part of our working memory called the 'phonological loop.' It was first described by psychologists Alan Baddeley and Graham Hitch in 1974. You can think of it as a tiny recording and playback device in your head. It has an 'inner ear' that holds a sound for a couple of seconds, and an 'inner voice' that rehearses it on a loop to keep it from fading. [CAROLINE]: And a jingle, being short, simple, and repetitive, is the perfect fuel for that loop. [ARIS]: The perfect fuel. But repetition isn't the whole story. Emotion is the glue. A jingle activates the amygdala—the brain's emotional hub. That little burst of pleasure or nostalgia essentially tells your brain's memory centers, 'Hey! Pay attention! This is important.' [BRENDA]: Important? A song about wanting to be a hot dog? [CAROLINE]: [Laughs] That's the thing! The brain doesn't distinguish between 'important for survival' and 'important because it's catchy and makes me feel good for a second.' And sometimes, Mom, that catchiness backfires. It becomes… a tormentor. [ARIS]: This is what researcher James Kellaris calls the 'cognitive itch.' The brain gets stuck on an incomplete musical phrase from the jingle. It keeps replaying it, trying to 'scratch' the itch, to find a resolution that isn't there. But the scratching—the mental repetition—only makes the itch worse. It's a feedback loop. [BRENDA]: I'll say. In the eighties, there was this jingle for a local carpet store, 'Carpet-o-Rama, on Route 22!' It was just that, over and over. I swear, one afternoon, I heard it in my head for three straight hours while trying to do my taxes. It nearly broke me. [ARIS]: And the cruel irony, what neurologists call 'ironic process theory,' is that the more you actively try *not* to think about it, the more entrenched it becomes. The act of suppression is a form of attention. You are, in effect, commanding your brain to focus on the very thing you want to ignore. The late, great Oliver Sacks noted that earworms can feel utterly out of our control, like a possession. [CAROLINE]: So the very thing that makes the jingle a brilliant ad is what makes it a potential tiny, personal torture device. Okay so, there's another layer here. For most of us, this is all happening in the auditory parts of our brain. But not for everyone. Aris, can you talk about synesthesia? [ARIS]: Of course. Synesthesia is a fascinating crossing of the wires in the brain. The word means 'senses joined together.' For a synesthete, a stimulus in one sense triggers an automatic, involuntary experience in another. The most common form in this context is chromesthesia—where sound evokes color. [BRENDA]: You're telling me someone hears the Nationwide jingle and sees… what, a station wagon? [ARIS]: [A small, appreciative smile] They might see a color. For them, hearing 'Nationwide is on your side' isn't just a sound; it’s accompanied by a burst of, say, deep, dependable blue. The bright, brassy fanfare of the old Folgers jingle might be a shimmering gold or a sharp yellow. It's not an idea or an association; it's a direct, consistent perceptual experience. [CAROLINE]: And we think this is because of… extra connections in the brain? [ARIS]: The leading theory is called cross-activation. It suggests that in synesthetes, there's more neural crosstalk between adjacent brain regions. So the auditory cortex, which processes the sound of the jingle, has a more active link to, for instance, area V4 in the visual cortex, which processes color. It’s as if the lane dividers on their neural highway are a bit blurry. The jingle's sound literally spills over and becomes color. [BRENDA]: Well, I suppose from an advertising standpoint, that’s a two-for-one deal. [CAROLINE]: [Laughs] Trust my mom to find the economic angle. That is a perfect transition. Let's talk about some of the jingles that have given the absolute best return on investment. [TIMING: ~11:30] [CAROLINE]: The Hall of Fame. After Wheaties, you get these absolute titans. Oscar Mayer basically taught a generation of kids how to spell 'bologna.' [BRENDA]: O-S-C-A-R. My bologna has a first name. Very effective. You remembered the brand and the product. Clear messaging. [ARIS]: And the melodic contour of that jingle is masterful. It has an upward, questioning arc that resolves perfectly on the final word. It's a complete musical sentence. It’s satisfying to the ear, which makes the brain want to repeat it. [CAROLINE]: Then in 1971, which was apparently the Big Bang for jingles, you get three that are still with us. McDonald's gave us 'You Deserve a Break Today.' [BRENDA]: A brilliant appeal to overworked mothers everywhere. [CAROLINE]: A young Barry Manilow wrote 'Like a Good Neighbor, State Farm is There.' Just a few notes, but it’s pure sonic reassurance. [ARIS]: Listen to the shape of it. Three main notes. Buh-buh-BUM. It sounds like a gentle knock on the door. It’s non-threatening, stable. The sound perfectly matches the message. [CAROLINE]: And then, the giant. Coca-Cola's 'I'd Like to Teach the World to Sing.' It was so powerful it escaped the ad entirely. [ARIS]: It transcended commerce because it wasn't selling a feature; it was selling an ideal. Harmony, unity, peace. It tapped into the post-60s zeitgeist and attached that powerful, universal emotion to… sugar water. It's a masterclass in emotional branding. [BRENDA]: The budget for that commercial must have been enormous. All those people on a hilltop in Italy. I hope they filed the correct expense reports. [TIMING: ~13:45] [CAROLINE]: This is how jingles become more than ads. They become part of our shared cultural soundtrack. They are memory machines. Hearing one from your childhood doesn't just bring back the tune; it brings back the feeling of the shag carpet under your feet, the whole context. [BRENDA]: I remember one from the 60s for Brylcreem. 'Brylcreem, a little dab'll do ya!' All the boys used it. Your grandfather smelled of it for a decade. See? You say the words, and I can smell it. [CAROLINE]: That’s it! The senses are all tied together. The jingle is the key that unlocks this whole network of memories. And Aris, this deep cultural embedding, the nostalgia… that's a powerful tool. [ARIS]: It’s perhaps the most powerful tool. Nostalgia is a direct line to the brain's trust centers. When a brand uses a classic jingle, they aren't just selling you a product. They're selling you a comforting, idealized version of your own past. It’s an emotional shortcut that bypasses rational decision-making. It feels safe, familiar. [TIMING: ~15:15] [CAROLINE]: Which brings us to today. Some people say the jingle is dead, replaced by licensing expensive pop songs. But I don't think it's dead. I think it's… mutated. [ARIS]: It has atomized. In an era of six-second ads and voice assistants, the 30-second song is a luxury. The jingle has evolved into the 'sonic logo.' [CAROLINE]: Okay so, define that for us. [ARIS]: A sonic logo is the jingle's descendant, stripped to its absolute essence. It’s a very short, distinctive, usually non-lyrical sound that *is* the brand. The two-note 'ta-dum' of Netflix is the quintessential example. It’s not a song *about* Netflix; it *is* the sound of Netflix. [BRENDA]: It's the sound my smart TV makes when I’m about to waste three hours watching a baking show. [ARIS]: But you recognize it instantly. It builds anticipation. It confirms you're in the right place. Or think of the six-note melody for Mastercard. It's a sound of security and confirmation at the point of sale. These sounds are engineered with incredible precision to work in milliseconds, often without any visual component. [BRENDA]: I have a sound on my phone. When I get a notification from my bank, it makes this little *cha-ching* sound. It’s supposed to be reassuring, I think. But the other day, the app updated, and now it makes a sound like a bubble popping. A little *bloop*. It’s very unsatisfying. A deposit should not sound like a 'bloop.' [ARIS]: [Genuinely excited] That is a perfect description! You see? The 'cha-ching' has a sharp, metallic, positive transient. It implies value, gain. The 'bloop' is a rounded, falling tone. It sounds like a dismissal, a finality without value. Your intuitive, emotional reaction is a perfect demonstration of why sonic branding is so critical. The sound itself carries meaning, independent of the context. [CAROLINE]: My mother, the accidental sonic branding analyst. I love it. So this is the future? These micro-jingles, these audio logos? [ARIS]: It has to be. As we interact more with technology through voice—smart speakers, cars, appliances—sound becomes the primary branding interface. There's no screen. The brand's entire identity might be conveyed in a one-second sound. We're even seeing AI tools that can generate and optimize these sounds for maximum emotional impact and memorability. The jingle isn't dead; it's becoming more sophisticated and more pervasive than ever. [TIMING: ~18:00] [CAROLINE]: So, we come full circle. Back to that dying cereal in 1929. The Wheaties jingle wasn't just a song. It was a piece of cognitive machinery that found a backdoor into the brains of thousands of people, using the ancient technology of the oral tradition to make a brand unforgettable. [ARIS]: And the Coca-Cola song wasn't just a melody. It was a piece of emotional engineering that bottled a universal human longing and sold it back to us, proving that the most effective jingles don't just get stuck in our heads; they get stuck in our hearts. [BRENDA]: And from a practical standpoint, the return on investment for both was staggering. They spent a little on a song and built empires. You can't argue with those numbers. [CAROLINE]: [Laughs] You really can't. Dr. Aris Thorne, Brenda Wallis, my mom… thank you both for this fascinating conversation. [ARIS]: The pleasure was all mine. [BRENDA]: It was lovely, dear. Now, let's go get some lunch. My treat. [CAROLINE]: The Grand Unified Theory of X is a production of… [SOUND of a gentle, ambient outro melody that plays to finish]
Episode __: Jingles - The Tiny Tunes That Colonize Your Brain
Jingles aren't just catchy melodies; they are powerful tools of cognitive engineering, designed to embed brands deep within our minds. This episode explores their surprising history, from ancient mnemonic chants to modern sonic logos, and delves into the neuroscience behind why these tiny tunes become unforgettable earworms.
Key Topics Covered:
- The etymology and evolution of the word "jingle"
- The oral tradition as the ancient ancestor of jingles and mnemonic devices
- The birth and impact of the first radio jingle (Wheaties)
- The neuroscience behind earworms (Involuntary Musical Imagery) and the phonological loop
- The "cognitive itch" and the psychological torment of a stuck jingle
- Synesthesia: how some brains experience jingles as colors or other sensations
- Iconic jingles, their cultural impact, and surprising origins (e.g., Coca-Cola, Barry Manilow)
- The evolution of jingles into modern sonic branding and audio logos
Referenced Studies and Researchers:
- Alan Baddeley and Graham Hitch (1974) - Phonological Loop (working memory model)
- Dr. James Kellaris - "Cognitive Itch" and earworm research
- Oliver Sacks (2007) - Observations on earworms and musical phenomena (Musicophilia)
- Georg Tobias Ludwig Sachs (1812) - First documented account of synesthesia
Books/Articles Mentioned:
- Musicophilia: Tales of Music and the Brain by Oliver Sacks (2007)
- Working Memory by Alan Baddeley & Graham Hitch (1974)
- Dissecting earworms: Further evidence on the song-stuck-in-your-head phenomenon by J. J. Kellaris (2003)
- The cognitive neuroscience of synesthesia by T. L. Hubbard (2010)
- Twenty Ads That Shook the World by James B. Twitchell (2000)
- Sonic Branding: An Introduction by D. Jackson (2013)
Credits:
Hosted by Dr. Caroline Wallis. Featuring Dr. Aris Thorne and Brenda Wallis.
Episode __