Lightmancer
Legend
- Location
- Sunny Frimley
- Name
- Bill Palmer
Confession time.
I suffer from earworms. Really quite badly. I have done for years, but it is getting worse. I have no control over it and the worst thing of all is that my personal earworms have no musical taste at all. I can get stuck with the most excerable tunes in my head, just because I have heard a snatch of something.
I don't even have to hear the tune itself. If someone says something that inadvertently brings a song to mind - a lyric, for instance, or something seemingly innocent like "look at that lady over there in the red dress" (Chris De Burgh has just started up in my head - AARGH) I'm stuck on an endless loop of acoustic misery until something else - often another tune - breaks the cycle. Even going for a walk does it. The steady rhythm causes tunes to wriggle in. Even stopping and starting doesn't help. When waiting to cross the road, I'll indulge in a drum solo in my head.
"First world problem" I hear you say. My wife is sympathetic, but really doesn't understand why I have to sit with my fingers in my ears when the adverts come on the telly - ah yes, the adverts - EVERY SINGLE ONE has to have a tune now; words and pictures are no longer enough. Yes I know why, I know the psychology of using music in advertising, I understand all about how the brain encodes emotional memories - knowing doesn't help and has led me to boycott specific products and companies because of their blatant tune-pretzeling.
The worst - by far the worst - adverts are the ones where they have got a reedy-voiced popstrel to re-record an old song muuuuch mooooore slooooowly to make it sound wistful and melancholy. I also reserve a particular circle of hell for the truncation of lyrics - this is the auditory equivalent of running nails down a blackboard as the third or fourth line of a verse is left out deliberately to make it fit the advert's run time. My brain suddenly derails as the version of the tune in my head stays true to the original but the advert has gone off into territory of it's own.
Enough ranting.
All this leads me to the thought that if you can have earworms, why can't I also coin the term "lensworms" - these are motifs or subjects that you just can't help snapping, even if you and others have taken them a million times before, and even if you are a better photographer than that. We all have them - pure tourist tat of the "I was really there!" variety. Photographic fromage. I do it myself; I am going through editing shots from a recent trip to Tuscany; there's the elegiac landscape in the morning mist, and there the quirky shot of two kids drooling over the gelati in the shop. I can't help myself, my lens is drawn and my finger presses the shutter of it's own accord.
Anyone else want to confess? Misery loves company...
I suffer from earworms. Really quite badly. I have done for years, but it is getting worse. I have no control over it and the worst thing of all is that my personal earworms have no musical taste at all. I can get stuck with the most excerable tunes in my head, just because I have heard a snatch of something.
I don't even have to hear the tune itself. If someone says something that inadvertently brings a song to mind - a lyric, for instance, or something seemingly innocent like "look at that lady over there in the red dress" (Chris De Burgh has just started up in my head - AARGH) I'm stuck on an endless loop of acoustic misery until something else - often another tune - breaks the cycle. Even going for a walk does it. The steady rhythm causes tunes to wriggle in. Even stopping and starting doesn't help. When waiting to cross the road, I'll indulge in a drum solo in my head.
"First world problem" I hear you say. My wife is sympathetic, but really doesn't understand why I have to sit with my fingers in my ears when the adverts come on the telly - ah yes, the adverts - EVERY SINGLE ONE has to have a tune now; words and pictures are no longer enough. Yes I know why, I know the psychology of using music in advertising, I understand all about how the brain encodes emotional memories - knowing doesn't help and has led me to boycott specific products and companies because of their blatant tune-pretzeling.
The worst - by far the worst - adverts are the ones where they have got a reedy-voiced popstrel to re-record an old song muuuuch mooooore slooooowly to make it sound wistful and melancholy. I also reserve a particular circle of hell for the truncation of lyrics - this is the auditory equivalent of running nails down a blackboard as the third or fourth line of a verse is left out deliberately to make it fit the advert's run time. My brain suddenly derails as the version of the tune in my head stays true to the original but the advert has gone off into territory of it's own.
Enough ranting.
All this leads me to the thought that if you can have earworms, why can't I also coin the term "lensworms" - these are motifs or subjects that you just can't help snapping, even if you and others have taken them a million times before, and even if you are a better photographer than that. We all have them - pure tourist tat of the "I was really there!" variety. Photographic fromage. I do it myself; I am going through editing shots from a recent trip to Tuscany; there's the elegiac landscape in the morning mist, and there the quirky shot of two kids drooling over the gelati in the shop. I can't help myself, my lens is drawn and my finger presses the shutter of it's own accord.
Anyone else want to confess? Misery loves company...
