Hooks in Popular Music / Progress in Mathematics (PDF)

"Drawing on musicology, psychology, neuroscience, and auditory processing, the authors provide a brilliant and engaging account of the many strategies used by successful musicians to make their songs stand out, grab hold of our attention, and leave us humming their music at the most inopportune moments."

- William Forde Thompson, author of Music, Thought and Feeling: Understanding the Psychology of Music

"With its mix of psychological and music theoretical insights, and a knack for easily conveying these even to non-experts, this study is a major step forward in helping us understand what we love about popular music. Rarely has academic writing that takes music seriously been that much fun to read."

- Ralf von Appen, Professor for the Theory and History of Popular Music, University of Music and Performing Arts, Vienna

This volume is the first book-length study of hooks in popular music. Hooks - those memorable musical moments for listeners such as a riff or catchy melodic phrase - are arguably the guiding principle of much modern popular music. The concept of the hook involves aspects of melody, rhythm, harmony, production, lyrical and cultural meaning - and how these interact within a song's topline and backing track. Hooks are also inherently related to the human capacities for memory and attention, and interact with our previous experiences with music. Understanding hooks in popular music requires a new interdisciplinary approach drawing from popular music studies, pop musicology, and music psychology, and this book draws from each of these disciplines to understand the hooks present in a broad range of popular music styles from the last thirty years.

Tim Byron is a lecturer in the School of Psychology at the University of Wollongong, Australia. His research interests include hooks, the conscious experience of earworms, and the effect of music on cognitive tasks.

¿Jadey O'Regan is a lecturer in Contemporary Music Practice at the Sydney Conservatorium of Music (University of Sydney), Australia. Her research interests include pop hooks, genre, empirical musicology, creativity, and large-scale music analyses of pop music.