Earworm

One of the Monster’s talents we’ve noticed, a long time ago, is his ability to remember and reproduce music.

At one point, we’d investigated music therapy for him, but discontinued it when his schedule got more pressing and it didn’t seem to be having an effect.  But throughout, we’ve continued to notice that he has little… tunes caught in his head.Normally, it’s a guessing game between me and the wife to try to figure out what he’s singing.  More recently, we’ve turned to online tools to figure out the songs when they’re outside our repertoires.  The source depends on the day – sometimes they listen to music in class and he’s coming home humming music from there (“Spring” from “The Four Seasons”), sometimes it’s from something R has on the iPad (“In the Hall of the Mountain King”), and sometimes, it’s something from the bus or elsewhere (“Me, Myself and I”).  And it’s… interesting.

Last night’s earworm was “Kernkraft 400” – the Monster heard it at a ballgame, and while he was melting down last night once we’d gotten home, he kept repeating it ad nauseam as his apparent calming mechanism.  Now, if you know the song at all, you know that it’s very repetitive, and it gets tiresome after a few minutes of looping. Before we could decide to go get earplugs or the like, my wife pulled out her iPad and started looking for similar music, and… it worked to calm him down enough to get him settled for bed.

And go figure.  The Monster likes EDM.  He doesn’t seem to be too picky between that, Darude, Daft Punk and Eiffel 65 (the performers she’s tried so far), but he was listening to it attentively and seeming to enjoy it a good deal.  Not my taste in music, or hers, but… if it works, right?  To be fair, though, he likes most music from what we’ve seen, but this is really the first time I think we’ve actually seen a genre calm him down, rather than repetition of familiar songs that he himself can sing along with.

Of course, if we’d not started off today again with “Kernkraft 400” while I was getting him showered…

 

(FWIW – apologies for being quiet for so long.  I got preoccupied with real life over the summer, and haven’t had the wherewithal to write.  Everything’s been fine – just very, very busy.  I’ll talk a bit more about what’s been up in the coming days.)

Leave a Reply

Your email address will not be published. Required fields are marked *