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Occasionally people will hear music on loop even when they don’t want to, for example when a song gets stuck in our heads. This phenomenon is called an “earworm,” and it is an old and global scourge. The English term comes from the German Ohrwurm (literally “ear worm”) while the French call it musique entêtante, or “stubborn music.” Thomas Edison invented the phonograph in 1877, one year after Mark Twain published a story in The Atlantic Monthly about young students haunted by an irresistible jingle. This is one cultural affliction that critics cannot blame on technology. The fault is in our
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