The Science Behind Summer Bangers

This article is part of our VICE Weekends summer series, presented by Weis

Illustration by Ashley Goodall

Music can pump us up and calm us down, but what attributes rank highest in the banger-making hierarchy? We spoke to Tim Byron who has a PhD in music psychology to better understand the psychological factors behind people's different music preferences and find out what alchemy is needed to make a song of the summer.

VICE: How does hearing music make us feel feelings?
Tim Byron: We have this unconscious machinery in our head that is analysing music all the time and the result of that is an emotion that you feel. Your brain has been listening to and processing music all your life and it has come to understand what music is meant to mean just through experience. You have a sense of when you're meant to feel happy or meant to feel sad. You don't see the processing going on but you feel the end result.

What makes a song transcend into an inescapable summer anthem?
A variety of things play a role in that. I think it has to make people want to dance. Not necessarily that it's going to be a good song to dance to, but that it makes you want to feel like dancing. It also has to be the kind of thing that a radio programmer is going to want to put on their list and that a record company is going to actually promote. And for a song to get to two billion views on YouTube like Sorry, being able to appeal to lots of different demographics at once is also a good thing.

Some songs sound like other songs. Is that a trick to make people more receptive to new music?
When you hear a new song you want it to sound a little bit like songs you already know about. You want it to be familiar enough that you can understand what it's trying to do, but if it sounds exactly like other music you already know it'll be boring. You wouldn't get any sense of surprise in there and that sense of surprise is important. Part of what makes us feel anything about anything is that we don't know what's going to happen.

Are there cultural and social elements that contribute to the psychological power of music?
Yeah, definitely. Everyone has had a different set of experiences. Our responses to music are simply going to be different depending on who we are. You grew up in a certain environment, you heard a bunch of different music, you have a certain kind of personality where particular things around you influence you more than others—all of that is going to impact the music that you like. Not everyone has to like Uptown Funk; in fact the interesting thing about that song in a way is that it managed to get so many people with different backgrounds to like that song.

I wouldn't ever choose to press play on that song, but if I hear it in an Uber I'm not mad either.
That particular response is a really interesting one. For radio programmers too. What they want isn't necessarily the song everyone loves the most, they want the song that people aren't going to change the channel from.

What makes people gravitate to those big pop songs?
Not necessarily everybody, but most people want to feel connected. They want to feel a part of things. Historically, we like the experience of being together listening to music. I think that's a very deep thing in the human psyche and I think that comes out in the pop songs that are really popular.

Does a song's ability to get stuck in your head make it more likely to be a banger?
I think earworms definitely contribute to something being a banger. If you look at the way people use music, most of the time they're not just sitting there with earphones on marvelling at the sound of it all. When you listen to music you're often doing stuff; you're in the car, you're doing housework, studying maybe. Music works when it becomes a part of your life, or when you use it to help you get through a situation. As a result, when you get a song stuck in your head and it is a banger it reminds you 'Oh yeah, it's summer, we're having fun'—you hear it when you don't actually hear it and it gets you to remember the good feeling you have when you do hear the song.

Is that feeling because music releases chemical in our brains?
Yeah, there are big connections between the reward centres of the brain and the parts of the brain that process music, the temporal cortex to be specific. Dopamine seems to be a sort of reward chemical in the brain. We feel a dopamine rush when we are uncertain and we are rewarded by our predictions.

How can we seek out songs that will give us that rush?
Music psychologists believe when we listen to a song there are two separate processes going on. One is we're processing that song unconsciously by comparing it to the total sum of all the songs we've heard in the past and what usually happens in those songs. The second is that when we hear a song we have a memory of that song. So even when you've got a song doing things that are very expected to you because you know it well, you're still getting the effect of uncertainty and a dopamine rush from having compared it to all the other songs in the world that you've heard. As long as there is a mix of surprise and familiarity, then we get our best sort of dopamine rush reaction.

Are certain musical elements–arrangement, hooks, impressive vocal pyrotechnics, lyrics–more useful than others in engaging listeners or triggering uplifting moods?
In modern pop songs that are trying to get on the radio, they basically have to have a hook every five seconds or so. That's a very rapid progression of hooks. It ends up that the songs that get on radio have this weird hyperactive kind of quality where there's something happening all the time. What's clever about Uptown Funk or Sorry is that they have those hooks every five seconds but they don't feel like it. They aren't jumping out at you going 'Hey, I'm a hook! Hey, I'm a hook! Did I mention I'm a hook?' but every five seconds there is something interesting in the sounds of them. I think we don't always want songs to be so hyperactive, but we need it to be hyperactive in order to hear it on the radio in the first place, otherwise people will turn it off. But we don't want it to feel that way, because then we kind of feel like we're being played.

Is there a flip side to that? If hyperactivity helps make a hit, does it also pave the way for slower songs like's Bieber's more ballad-y Love Yourself to gain traction simply because it's different?
Absolutely. It's harder for record companies to get ballads that are not so hyperactive on the radio, but when they do they're more likely to get to the top of the charts because it stands out against everything else. When you have all these hyperactive songs that are trying to be uptempo hooky kinds of things, when you get something that isn't like that it's a hook in itself.

Psychologically, why are some songs more suited to summer?
I think there are certain kinds of musical styles we associate with summer in some ways, like musical styles from places that are hot. OMI is Jamaican and that sort of feels like a summery place. When people typically think of the Caribbean they imagine a summer paradise as opposed to somewhere cold and dreary.

There's also a whole lot of cultural expectation and cultural things that we want to believe about summer. There's a mythology of summer; we want it to be happy and joyful and the opposite to the dreariness of having to do exams or work. Summer is the myth that keeps people going and summer songs are a part of that myth. You want the good times and the fun in the sun. Like in Grease with Summer Nights, it's the idea of it being a time of no responsibility, of holiday, of fun and not worrying about stuff. I think with a summer song people want to have that feeling.

What makes musical experiences have such a profound and lasting influence in our lives?
I think there are certain kinds of people for whom music does that and there's other people for whom music doesn't. If you are attuned to music and it's something that makes you feel stuff and really gets to your core and explains something about the world to you and makes things make sense, then it's going to have that affect on you. Another thing is that music suggests, but it doesn't tell. With a book, there's subtext to a book, but there's also a lot of text. That text very much constrains the way you can interpret that book. The same for movies, they make a variety of choices about cinematography, about dialogue.

How does music suggest?
If you hear a C major chord it's meant to be a happy chord, but it doesn't specifically specify that as much as someone saying 'I am happy' in a book does. It's a little bit vaguer and ambiguous than a book, so you can relate it to your own experience a little bit better. That's one of the important things in the power of music. We don't have to feel the same things as the person creating the music in order to feel things about that music that are true or that feel right.

Music is like a coded language and we each read that language differently?
Exactly, because music is mathematical. There's a maths to music and of course there's a maths to timing music and rhythm in music. It's a weird thing to think about because we don't like out emotions to be mathematical.

Is that how songs are able to be engineered so that our brains respond positively?
Yeah, because what your brain is looking for is the maths of the music. Time is a mathematical function and so music is maths—it's a way of using mathematical code to express emotion.

One of the things about Uptown Funk that's really interesting is that the song is all build up. When it finally gets to the chorus it's like an anticlimax, because the chorus doesn't have much in the way of words or big hooks. The bigger hooks in the song are earlier on. In pop music in general you expect choruses, they're where you get the payoff for the hooks. One of the clever things about Uptown Funk is that it subverts our expectations; the chorus is okay, but by being okay it makes you want the next verse and when the next verse comes you feel good about it. You predicted it, you wanted it, and then it happened.

We're all just little hamsters in a musical hamster wheel.
We just have to remember that each of us is a different hamster, who is in a slightly different hamster wheel with slightly different ways to make that wheel spin around. We're not automatons who have to like a song because it's been created for us, but we are predictable in certain kinds of ways.

This article is presented by Weis