There are many events so far in 2026 that could reasonably have been predicted, but perhaps one which couldn’t is a Hackaday scribe in Europe unexpectedly finding herself with a constant earworm from Afroman. The rapper, who most of us know only from his year 2000 hit single about getting high, made the news after an inept police raid on his house, and in turn a court case over his musical denunciations of the authorities.
It’s fair to say they picked on the wrong guy, but in thinking about why, the answer is in the earworm. He has the unique skill of making a song irritatingly catchy, which led us to the question of how a catchy song works. As luck would have it a team from the University of Waterloo have recently released a paper in which they explain it all in terms of maths, giving the rest of us a formula where the likes of Afroman are presumably born with it.
We won’t pretend that Hackaday’s mathematical expertise stretches beyond that needed for engineering, but for the more advanced numberphiles among us the university’s write-up goes into some detail about their use of group theory to study the patterns and symmetry in a given piece of music. It’s a new approach that joins other more famous guides to musical success, so perhaps if you couple it with the stuff your music teacher failed to tell you in school, you could be on your way to the top of the charts. Meanwhile here at Hackaday we’ll stick to more conventional inspiration.
Header: Chris Gilmore, CC BY-SA 2.0.
Fine, but I’m not willing to pay Spring✡r 30 EUR to download a paper, which may turn out pretty meh.
It’s available on sci-hub. Try not to overuse sci-hub, out of respect for what they’re trying to do – download the paper and read it locally.
https://sci-net.xyz/10.1007/978-3-031-84869-8_5
Note that this is a conference paper by a PhD student, and not a paper published in a peer-reviewed journal. Lots of indirect speech and soft wording.
Note also, the paper says nothing about popular songs! It’s only a mathematical framework for identifying melodic structure within songs!
The paper does not examine existing songs and does not make any claim as to why specific songs are memorable.
From the linked article (not the paper):
This here, these lines written by the reporter, do not correlate at all with the contents of the paper. The paper makes no claims about memorable and satisfying songs, it only identifies the types of symmetry that can be found in songs.
The first rule of sci club is:
you do not link sci club directly.
Excellent reply; it removes pointless spotlight and gives proper credits to the real accomplishments where they belong.
University of Waterloo is the Canada’s MIT and, as a side note, they compete with Caltech, Stanford and Carnegie Melon quite well. Whether “popular media” knows that fact or not is irrelevant.
So what you’re saying is, the whole thing is just cheap clickbait?
Who could have guessed.
Most of the time the only thing you need from S. & Co is the doi.org link to read the paper elsewhere.
I will not link directly for plausible deniability. If you can read academic papers you know how to research things. ;-)
There’s a sort of recursive or fractal nature to Afroman’s latest hits as well: Lemon Pound Cake uses the melody from Under the Boardwalk, which itself was a hit back in the day. Naturally, with the notoriety and generally amusing nature of Afroman taking a proverbial lemon and squeezing the hell out of it, that combined with a classic oldies hit would itself result in a hit.
“irritatingly catchy” about describes a lot of music consisting of regurgitation and rhythmical excretion of poorly digested auditory shreds.
-Lawyer: Sir, there is no way to prove that you’re a son of a bitch, right?”
-Randy Walters (answering seriously): “No sir, she’s been dead for years.”
“What gets measured gets managed.” – We can presume that the paper will add another tool for our server-farm AI overlords to create a miasma of earworms.
That said, Afroman deserves a shining place in history for his panache – probably the only way to garner any sort of accountability from the local police. One hopes he’s allowed to continue unmolested.
Afromaga
MAGFRO