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THE MUSIC OF SOUND

The Power of Repetition—in Song and Speech

Savan Kotecha knows the number by heart: one hundred sixty. It is the number of rejection letters he keeps in a folder at his parents’ home in Austin, Texas. The signatures include the names of some of the famous labels and music publishers in the country. Each one came to the same conclusion. Kotecha’s songs just weren’t good enough.

Today, Kotecha’s reputation hangs on larger numbers. Two hundred million, for example, is the number of copies of Kotecha’s songs that have sold worldwide. As a writer and producer for pop stars like Ariana Grande, Justin Bieber, Usher, Maroon 5, Carrie Underwood, and One Direction, Kotecha has become one of the most prolific young pop music writers in the United States and a contributor on more than a dozen top ten songs in the U.S. and UK, including several number one hits like “Can’t Feel My Face” by The Weeknd and “What Makes You Beautiful” by One Direction.

When he was a boy, Kotecha’s father worked for IBM, which moved the family all over the country. In Austin, where they finally landed, he slept on the living room couch of his parents’ small apartment. One day he wandered into his sister’s room and discovered a keyboard. He sat down to play with it. Something lit up inside him. From that day on, Kotecha says, he was obsessed with every dimension of writing and performing music. He taught himself to play piano while studying music theory. He sang in both the school choir and in a boy band. He devoured books about the history of pop music and explanatory guides about music labels and music publishers.

As Kotecha dreamed of a life writing songs that soak the airwaves, his practical studies suffered. He might have gotten into more trouble for skipping classes, but his choir teacher recognized the young kid’s talent as something potentially extraordinary. When Kotecha’s mother would phone the school, this music instructor would often take the call and cover for him with an excuse for his absences. “My parents were freaking out,” Kotecha told me about his early music habit, quickly offering by way of explanation, “They were very traditional Indian parents.”

He sent out hundreds of demo tapes and received more than one hundred dismissive letters, which he deliberately saved, like pelts of rejection. When he graduated and insisted that his future was still in an industry that had so consistently offered nothing but spurning, Kotecha’s dad gave his son an ultimatum. “He said I had two years to be a loser and then I had to go to college,” he recalled with a laugh.

Kotecha hustled his way into music festivals. At South by Southwest, Austin’s music-and-everything-else festival, he would drive downtown to the DoubleTree and other hotels, slink into the lobby, and pass out demo tapes to every A&R scout who walked through the doors. The DoubleTree kicked him out several times. Kotecha learned to pack multiple disguises. When hotel management showed him the door, he would return several minutes later in a new shirt, only to be kicked out again (and return, again, in another new outfit with more demos).

Finally, in 1999, Kotecha caught a break. A New York music executive with deep connections in Stockholm gave him instructions that would change his life: “Go to Sweden.”

If pop music were a global technology, Sweden would be its Silicon Valley. Sweden and Swedish expats are the world’s inexhaustible fount of catchy melodies. Led by Max Martin, the legendary superproducer responsible for dozens of number one singles by the Backstreet Boys, Katy Perry, and Taylor Swift, the small Scandinavian country has been exporting contagious music to the world since ABBA debuted in the 1970s.

Why Sweden? The answer involves a mix of policy, history, and the magnetizing effect of talent. First, the Swedish government actively promotes public music education at a time when many countries have no such policy (“I have public music education to thank for everything,” Martin said in 2001). Second, Sweden has a musical culture that promotes major-chord melodies over lyrics, which makes their songs highly exportable to audiences who don’t speak Swedish.

Third, since ABBA’s heyday in the 1970s, Sweden has built a national industry dedicated to writing, producing, and selling pop music, which attracts some of the best pop talent in the world—like a gifted Indian American teenager from Austin, Texas. Economists sometimes call this magnetizing effect “agglomeration,” and it’s why similar companies have a tendency to congregate in the same cities.10 When geographers at Uppsala University studied Sweden’s music industry, they said that it followed a model that economist Michael Porter calls “industrial clustering.” The same way that talented entrepreneurs go to San Francisco to be around people like them in the software industry, songwriters gravitate to Swedish power centers.

“In Sweden, I met up with RedOne, Lady Gaga’s songwriter, and his whole crew,” Kotecha recalled. “Through another connection there, I met Simon Cowell and became involved with The X-Factor, which made me the lead coach and songwriter for One Direction. A few years later, I met Max Martin. And then everything really exploded.”

Kotecha is rapturous about Martin, who, for several decades, has been at the core of this spool of Swedish songwriters. In an interview with the Hollywood Reporter, he compared Martin to the Michael Jordan of pop music.

The comparison fascinated me. I can see clearly what makes Michael Jordan a great shooter and defender. I wondered if the originator of the analogy could apply a bit of rigor to the ineffable art of songwriting. So I asked Kotecha: “If Michael Jordan is Michael Jordan because he can score efficiently, what makes Max Martin his industry’s Michael Jordan?”

Kotecha did not hesitate to answer. “That’s easy. He has the best ear for catchy melodies—maybe the best in pop history,” he said. “He can write great melodies, he understands what’s wrong with other people’s melodies, he’s a genius song doctor, an amazing arranger, and an amazing finisher.”

“What did Max Martin teach you?” I asked. “That great pop music is very, very structured,” Kotecha continued. “The construction of a pop song is something almost mathematical. Max taught me that each part has to speak to the other parts. If the verse starts on the one [the first beat], the pre-chorus should start on the one. Melodies need to get to the hook quickly and then repeat. That’s what makes it catchy.”

What is that thing—catchiness? What is it about a line of melody that makes a hook irresistible? Even the best songwriters sometimes cannot explain the anatomy of a great hook. Like many artists quizzed on the specific mechanics of their process, they react the way an ordinary person would if asked to explain the finer details of breathing. The skill is so intrinsic that the mechanics become invisible.

To understand the basic elements of catchiness—why we like what we like from song and speech—it’s worth starting at the beginning.

How does a sound become a song?

 • • • 

One morning in the spring of 2009, Walter Boyer, a fifth-grade music teacher at the Atwater School in Shorewood, Wisconsin, asked his eighteen fifth-grade students to listen to a recoding of a woman speaking. As they sat still, a lilting voice came over the air.

The sounds as they appear to you are not only different from those that are really present, but they sometimes behave so strangely as to seem quite impossible.

This was a topsy-turvy sentence for a group of unsuspecting fifth-graders. Some crinkled their faces, as if the words were ancient German. But they kept listening. As the recording continued, several words played again.

. . . sometimes behave so strangely . . .

And again.

Sometimes behave so strangely.

Again.

Sometimes behave so strangely.

As these four words looped over and over, something quite strange happened. Through repetition, the spoken words seemed to develop a rhythm and even a melody. Smiles broke across the children’s faces.

“Try it,” Mr. Boyer suggested, and suddenly, as if reading sheet music, the students broke into song, in perfect unison. “Sometimes behave so strangely,” they sang together. Many giggled at the shock of ordinary words transforming, as if by magic, into music. Some of them even danced in their seats.

Mr. Boyer stopped the recording. “Did you hear the melody?” he asked the class.

“Yahhhh,” they replied, in the lazy drawl of kids forced to answer an obvious question.

“Was she ever really singing, though?”

“Noooo,” they said.

“So, why do you think it happened?” The class was silent.

Several weeks later, Diana Deutsch, a psychologist at the University of California, San Diego, received a video of Mr. Boyer’s fifth-grade class. Deutsch was hosting a dinner party at her home in La Jolla. She nearly cried at the sight of eighteen children singing with a voice—her voice—as it transformed from speech into music by mere repetition.

Deutsch is a detective of musical illusions. Her most famous discovery is the phenomenon witnessed in Mr. Boyer’s music class. It is the “speech-to-song illusion.” If you take a spoken phrase and repeat it at a common interval, the spoken words can evolve to sound like music. When Deutsch plays the “sometimes behave so strangely” phrase to her own research subjects, they invariably sing back a melody so precise that it has a key, time signature, syncopation, and rhythm. If you can read music, it sounds just like this:

“When somebody is talking, there is a central executive in the brain that makes decisions about whether a phrase is spoken or sung,” Deutsch told me. “Repetition is a clue. It tells the brain to listen for music.”

More than an illusive trick, repetition is the God particle of music. Humpback whales, white-handed gibbons, and more than four hundred American species of birds are considered singers, and animal researchers reserve the term “sing” for only specific sounds that repeat at common intervals.

The power of repetition in human music is fractal, appearing at every level. Repetition of rhythm is necessary to build a musical hook. The repetition of hooks is necessary for choruses. Choruses repeat several times in each song, and people often honor their favorite songs by putting them on repeat. As every parent can attest, children love hearing the same songs again and again. But grown-ups aren’t so different. Ninety percent of the time people listen to music, they are listening to a song they’ve already heard.

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 brains.

Therein resides the real mystery. Earworms are stranger than they appear. If you show a friend one quarter of a Claude Monet painting, she will not spend the next thirty minutes complaining that she cannot stop seeing the other three quarters. (If she does, take her directly to a research hospital.) Why do people get earworms, but not, pardon the imagery, eyeworms—or noseworms or tongueworms, for that matter?

Earworms are like a keyhole into music’s manipulation of time’s past and future. The earworm-infested brain is stuck in a loop between repetition (I want to remember how this goes) and anticipation (I want to know how this ends). This very entanglement—the pull of repetition versus the push of anticipation—defines the catchiest songs.

I think back to my favorite hooks and how they often seem to break in half—a fall and a rise, a question and its answer. Swinging down at “bye bye” and swinging up at “Miss American Pie”; low at “With the lights out” and high at “it’s less dangerous”; rising at “she loves you” and falling at “yeah, yeah, yeah”; a step down at “Hey, I just met you” and a step up at “and this is crazy.”11

A great musical hook is a great question with an answer that asks to repeat the question. “People like new and surprising melodies,” said Elizabeth Margulis, a musicologist at the University of Arkansas Music Cognition Lab. “But when we feel like we can accurately make tiny predictions about how a song is going to go, it feels really good.” It takes no effort to recall a catchy tune; the melody is self-remembering.

When a song gets stuck in your head, it can drive you crazy. But since the affliction is universal, timeless, and self-inflicted, it must say something about our internal circuitry. An earworm is a cognitive quarrel. The automatic mind craves repetition that the aware brain finds annoying. As we saw in previous chapters, perhaps the unconscious self wants more repetition—wants more of the old, wants more of the familiar—than the conscious self thinks is “good.”

 • • • 

This is not merely a theory about the annoying jingles that you can’t get out of your head. The underrated allure of repetition is a fundamental basis of the entire pop music economy.

The Billboard Hot 100 is the standard register of popularity in American music. It has counted down the top songs in the United States every week since 1958. But the Billboard list has been built on lies, half-lies, and made-up statistics. For decades, there was no way to accurately measure what songs played most on the radio, and there were also no reliable ways to know which albums sold the previous week at record stores. Billboard would rely on the honesty of radio stations and store owners, and neither party had much reason to be honest. Music labels nudged or outright bribed radio DJs to plug certain records. Record stores didn’t want to promote albums that had sold out. The industry was biased toward churn. The labels wanted songs and albums to enter and exit the charts quickly so they could keep selling new hits.12

In 1991, Billboard ditched this patchy honor system and started collecting point-of-sale data from cash registers. “This was revolutionary,” explained Silvio Pietroluongo, Billboard’s director of charts. “We were finally able to see which records were actually selling.” Around the same time, the company started monitoring radio airplay through Nielsen. The Hot 100 become a lot more honest in the span of a few months.

This had two major implications. First, hip-hop surged in the rankings while old-fashioned rock slowly began to fade. (Perhaps an industry dominated by white guys hadn’t paid enough attention to the music interests of minorities.)13 On June 22, 1991, the week after Billboard updated its chart methodology, Niggaz4life by N.W.A. beat Out of Time by R.E.M., marking the first time a rap group had the most popular album in the country. A recent study of the last fifty years in U.S. pop music named the 1991 ascension of rap “the single most important event that has shaped the musical structure of the American charts.” In markets where popularity matters, information is marketing. When music listeners learned how popular hip-hop really was, it made hip-hop even more popular.14

Something else happened to American music preferences: They got a lot more repetitive. Without the music labels manipulating the charts, Billboard was a more perfect mirror of American tastes, and the reflection in the mirror said: Just play the hits! The ten songs that have spent the most time on the Hot 100 were all released after 1991. Since the most popular songs now stay on the charts for months, the relative value of a hit has exploded. The top 1 percent of bands and solo artists now earn about 80 percent of all recorded music revenue. And even though the amount of digital music sold has surged, the ten bestselling tracks command 82 percent more of the market than they did a decade ago.

As Billboard’s Pietroluongo summed it up: “It turns out that we just want to listen to the same songs over and over again.” It’s part of the fractal force of repetition: People want to hear the same rhythms repeated within hooks repeated within choruses repeated within songs—and, left to our own devices, we put those songs on repeat.

But nobody wants to hear the exact same thing over and over forever. Too much repetition causes monotony. The question is, how do songwriters and their ilk know how to balance repetition and variety?

 • • • 

David Huron is a prominent musicologist at Ohio State University, and if you ask him about pop music, he’ll tell you about mice.

Take a mouse and play a loud noise—call it B. The mouse will freeze. Perhaps he’ll turn that tiny pointy white face in a look of sheer surprise. Play B again, and again he will be adorably startled. But eventually the mouse will stop reacting. The noise will no longer interest him. He’ll become “habituated.”

Habituation is common with music. Repetition might be the God particle, but it’s far from the only particle. You probably don’t want to hear “Three Blind Mice” right now, and you certainly don’t want to hear it seven times in a row. You liked the song once—when you were five?—but now it does nothing for you. That’s habituation, and it happens with every song and almost any stimulation. It’s the brain’s way of saying, “Been there, done that.”

In many aspects of life, habituating is normal and good. If you can’t focus at work because of construction noise but you soon forget it’s there, you’ll be more productive. But in entertainment, habituation is death. It’s “I’ve seen enough dark and shadowy comic book movies—no, thanks.” It’s “This new rap album is interchangeable with the artist’s last two albums, so nope.” If it’s true that audiences like repetition, and it’s true that audiences can be bored by too much repetition, how do you get people hooked without making them habituated?

Let’s return to our poor mouse. Rather than play B notes to the little guy forever, scientists can play several B notes in a row and then, just as he’s about to figure out the pattern, hit him with a new sound—C!

The C note will startle the mouse, too. But more important, the introduction of a new note will make the mouse forget a little bit about the B. This is called “dishabituation.” The single serving of C preserves the potency of the B stimulus. Eventually, the mouse will become habituated to both the B and the C. But that’s okay. Scientists can further slow the habituation process by introducing a third note—D!15

To scare a mouse for the longest period of time with the fewest notes, scientists have found success with variations on the following sequence:

BBBBC–BBBC–BBC–BC–D

Huron’s research has found that this sequence of repetition and variation reflects global music patterns—from European sonatas to Inuit throat singing to American rock. “Across the world, music is consistent with early repetition,” he said. “The idea is to be repetitive up to the point where people might pull their hair out, and then change things subtly. From a composer’s perspective, to make something simple and beautiful, you could think, ‘What’s the minimal amount of material I can compose to entertain my audience for the longest period of time?’”

I’m particularly drawn to the final snippet of the sequence, which is this:

BBC–BC–D

This structure might not seem obviously familiar to you. But let’s call B a verse, C a chorus, and D an alternate verse, or bridge. Replace the notes with their corresponding words and you get the following song structure. I think you’ll recognize it, because it might be the most common pattern of the last fifty years of pop music.

Verse-verse-chorus—verse-chorus—bridge16

The answer to the question How do I scare a mouse with the fewest notes for the longest period of time? turns out to be a specific pattern that anticipates the way so many modern pop songs are written. Early repetition sets up a C-chorus theme. The verse and chorus passages pass the baton back and forth. To avoid boring an audience, the artist introduces a D-bridge to dishabituate the listener from both verse and chorus and set up the final musical sequence.

Is a pop song just an elaborate mouse dishabituation study? Critics of modern pop might welcome such simplification, but the wiser conclusion here is more complicated and less incendiary.

When one stops to think about how repetitious people’s favorite pop songs are, how they reliably alternate verses, choruses, verses, choruses, bridges, and amplified choruses, it’s undeniable that great music offers anticipation within specific lines of expectation. “People find things more pleasurable the more times you repeat them, unless they become aware that you’re being repetitive,” Huron said. “People want to say, ‘I’m not seduced by repetition! I like new things!’ But disguised repetition is reliably pleasurable, because it leads to fluency, and fluency makes you feel good.”

Huron is unpacking the psychology of habituation, not offering a home assembly kit for writing the next great pop song. Repetition and variation do not make any piece of music great on their own. Instead, they establish clear rules within which great songwriters work. Writing poetry without rhyme is “like playing tennis without a net,” the poet Robert Frost once said. In music, repetition is the net.

 • • • 

Music may be more elemental than language. Song precedes speech—both in a human’s life and in human history. Infants can make singsong nonsense long before they can explain exactly why they deserve more candy. In the beginning of human language, speech and music were nearly the same—simple sounds uttered by groups, in repetition.

Before cuneiform or broader literacy, memory was a civilization’s library. It is little wonder, then, that many of the oldest literary classics—including Beowulf, Homer’s Odyssey and Iliad, Ovid’s Metamorphoses, Virgil’s Aeneid, and Geoffrey Chaucer’s Canterbury Tales—are considered epic poems. Each uses repetition, rhythm, rhyme, and alliteration to lock itself in the next storyteller’s memory bank. In some ways, repetition is memory—“prosthetic memory,” to borrow Alison Landsberg’s wonderful phrase. A song “remembers” its hook, on the listener’s behalf, by repeating it. Shakespeare’s sonnets “remember” their sounds by repeating them as rhymes.

For many people, it is easier to remember words when they’re attached to rhythms and melodies. Stroke victims and other sufferers of aphasic language disorders who struggle to speak can often still sing. Gabby Giffords, the Arizona congresswoman shot in the head in an assassination attempt, has struggled to regain her verbal ability. But in February 2015, she starred in an emotional and widely shared online video of her nailing every word in a passage from “Maybe,” a song from the musical Annie. Aphasia often comes from damage to the parts of the left brain that control language, but fMRI studies have shown that music therapy activates the right hemisphere’s melodic intelligence.

This suggests that repetition is powerful, not only for music, but for all communication. Music is like memory candy. Musical language helps people remember words, and it signals to people that some words are worth remembering. For thousands of years, writers and orators have persuaded audiences with their own “speech-to-song” effects—by coating their spoken words with repetition’s sweet syrup.

And they still are.

 • • • 

On July 27, 2004, the speechwriter Jon Favreau introduced himself to Barack Obama by asking the future president to stop talking.

Favreau was a twenty-three-year-old graduate of the College of the Holy Cross in Massachusetts working for Senator John Kerry’s presidential campaign. Obama, an Illinois state senator, was rehearsing the keynote speech he would deliver at the Democratic National Convention in Boston’s FleetCenter later that evening. Favreau interrupted the rehearsal and asked if the senator might consider tweaking a quip about red states and blue states. It was too similar to one of Kerry’s applause lines. Obama was reportedly furious; it was one of his favorite parts of the speech. He changed it anyway.

It was hard to say which man was the bigger imposter at the FleetCenter stage in the summer of 2004. The keynote speaker, Obama, had never held national office. The young Favreau had the good fortune to become a speechwriter only because Kerry’s campaign had been such a disaster before the Iowa caucus that more experienced advisers had abandoned it. “They couldn’t find anyone who wanted to come in when we were about to lose to [former Vermont governor Howard] Dean,” Favreau told Newsweek. “I became deputy speechwriter, even though I had no previous experience.”

Three months later, Kerry lost the presidential election, and Obama had become a national political celebrity in need of a speechwriter. In January 2005, Favreau met Obama in the Senate cafeteria in the Dirksen Office Building on Capitol Hill. The senator asked, “What’s your theory of speechwriting?”

“It’s interesting,” Favreau told me ten years after that meeting, “because what attracted me to Obama at first was not the soaring rhetoric, but his authenticity. I think a lot about empathy as a speechwriter. I always try to imagine the audience: Where are they coming from? What base of knowledge are they starting from? How do we both connect to where they are and lift them up a little bit?” He got the job. When Obama announced he was running for president several years later, Favreau became one of the youngest chief speechwriters of a presidential candidate in American history.

Three years later, in early 2008, Obama’s presidential campaign seemed charmed as it stormed into New Hampshire with a double-digit lead after winning the Iowa caucus. But he lost the primary to Hillary Clinton by three percentage points. On January 8, 2008, he took the stage at Nashua High School South, thanked his supporters, and delivered, in a loss, perhaps the most quoted speech of his career. He structured the address around a phrase so simple that he once rejected it for being too corny: “Yes, we can.”17

For when we have faced down impossible odds, when we’ve been told we’re not ready or that we shouldn’t try or that we can’t, generations of Americans have responded with a simple creed that sums up the spirit of a people: Yes, we can. Yes, we can. Yes, we can.

It was a creed written into the founding documents that declared the destiny of a nation: Yes, we can.

It was whispered by slaves and abolitionists as they blazed a trail towards freedom through the darkest of nights: Yes, we can.

It was sung by immigrants as they struck out from distant shores and pioneers who pushed westward against an unforgiving wilderness: Yes, we can.

It was the call of workers who organized, women who reached for the ballot, a president who chose the moon as our new frontier, and a King who took us to the mountaintop and pointed the way to the promised land: Yes, we can . . .

“It is the simplest phrase you can imagine,” Favreau said, “three monosyllabic words that people say to each other every day.” But the speech etched itself in rhetorical lore. It inspired music videos and memes and the full range of reactions that any blockbuster receives online today, from praise to out-of-context humor to arch mockery.

Obama’s “Yes, we can” refrain is an example of a rhetorical device known as epistrophe, or the repetition of words at the end of a sentence. It’s one of many famous rhetorical types, most with Greek names, based on some form of repetition.

There is anaphora, which is repetition at the beginning of a sentence (Winston Churchill: “We shall fight on the beaches, we shall fight on the landing grounds, we shall fight in the fields”). There is tricolon, which is repetition in short triplicate (Abraham Lincoln: “Government of the people, by the people, and for the people”). There is epizeuxis, which is the same word repeated over and over (Nancy Pelosi: “Just remember these four words for what this legislation means: jobs, jobs, jobs, and jobs”). There is diacope, which is the repetition of a word or phrase with a brief interruption (Franklin D. Roosevelt: “The only thing we have to fear is fear itself”) or, most simply, an A-B-A structure (Sarah Palin: “Drill baby drill!”). There is antithesis, which is repetition of clause structures to juxtapose contrasting ideas (Charles Dickens: “It was the best of times, it was the worst of times”). There is parallelism, which is repetition of sentence structure (the paragraph you just read).

Finally, there is the king of all modern speech-making tricks, antimetabole, which is rhetorical inversion: “It’s not the size of the dog in the fight; it’s the size of the fight in the dog.”

There are several reasons why antimetabole is so popular. First, it’s just complex enough to disguise the fact that it’s formulaic. Second, it’s useful for highlighting an argument by drawing a clear contrast. Third, it’s quite poppy, in the Swedish songwriting sense, building a hook around two elements—A and B—and inverting them to give listeners immediate gratification and meaning. The classic structure of antimetabole is AB;BA, which is easy to remember since it spells out the name of a certain Swedish band.18 Famous ABBA examples in politics include:

In particular, President John F. Kennedy made ABBA famous (and ABBA made John F. Kennedy famous). “Mankind must put an end to war, or war will put an end to mankind,” he said, and “Each increase of tension has produced an increase of arms; each increase of arms has produced an increase of tension,” and most famously, “Ask not what your country can do for you; ask what you can do for your country.”

Antimetabole is like the C–G–Am–F chord progression in Western pop music: When you learn it somewhere, you hear it everywhere.19 Difficult and even controversial ideas are transformed, through ABBA, into something like musical hooks.

Obama and Favreau did not lean quite so heavily on any one device, but they made a powerful combo in part because they thought about speeches the way Savan Kotecha and other songwriters think about songs—as requiring hooks, choruses, and clear structures.

They often drew on the speeches of Martin Luther King for inspiration, which were biblical, rhythmic, and propelled by a musicality that was explicit in the black preaching tradition. In The Hum: Call and Response in African American Preaching, the theologian Evans Crawford compared sermons to blues riffs, “characterized by improvised free rhythms and idiomatic counterpoint.” The perfect sermon would “start low, go slow, climb higher, and strike fire.”

Favreau, a self-taught pianist who studied classical music in college, delights in the comparison of his work to pop song writing. “A good line in a speech is like a good piece of music,” he said. “If you take a small thing and repeat it throughout the speech, like a chorus in a song, it becomes memorable. People don’t remember songs for the verses. They remember songs for the chorus. If you want to make something memorable, you have to repeat it.”

When they worked together on the most important addresses, Obama and Favreau would ask: “What’s the ‘spine’ of this speech?” The spine was the hook, the theme, or the rhetorical chorus that held a speech together.

In 2008, four years after their first meeting, the former Illinois state senator and former Kerry deputy speechwriter were back at the Democratic National Convention, this time as the historic nominee and his celebrated head speechwriter. Days before the address, the future president told Favreau that his speech wasn’t quite right. It needed a spine.

“He said, ‘Let’s think of something that can carry through the speech,’” Favreau recalled. “We ended up using the concept of the ‘American Promise’ as the thread. It held the speech together.” In the official transcript of the speech, Obama repeats the word “promise” thirty-two times.

U.S. political rhetoric might be getting more musical over time. In the 1850s, most presidential addresses were delivered with college-level rhetoric when judged by the Flesch-Kincaid readability test, a method developed for the U.S. Navy in the 1970s to ensure the simplicity of military instruction manuals. But since the 1940s, presidential addresses have been more like a sixth-grader’s level.

It’s tempting to see this trend as the dumbing down of the American audience. But the United States is considerably better educated than it was in the 1800s. The increased simplicity of political rhetoric is really a sign that political speeches aim to reach a broader audience and so are emulating other populist forms of mass entertainment, like music. In the early republic, when only white men could vote, “presidents could assume that they were speaking to audiences made up mostly of men like themselves: educated, civic-minded landowners,” said Jeff Shesol, a historian and former speechwriter for Bill Clinton.

But as voting rights expanded, presidential appeals broadened. The major shift toward simpler presidential speeches happened around 1920, which coincides with at least four positive developments: the Seventeenth Amendment allowing direct election of senators in 1913; the Nineteenth Amendment giving women the right to vote in 1920; the movement to make public education mandatory in the 1920s; and the spread of radio, which passed 50 percent penetration among U.S. households by the 1930s. (Television would get there twenty years later.) Simple political rhetoric didn’t undermine American democracy. The growth of American democracy made political rhetoric simple.

 • • • 

Musical language is mercenary. It cares about winning an attention war, and truth can be left bleeding on the field. People trust beautiful words, even when they’re wrong.

A cousin of the “speech-to-song” illusion is the “rhyme-as-reason” effect. Just as repetition of words can create the illusion of singing, musical language can create the illusion of rationality. Studies show that people consider rhyming quips—like “What sobriety conceals, alcohol reveals” or “Woes unite foes”—more accurate than their nonrhyming versions—like “What sobriety conceals, beer unmasks.” Repetition and rhythm are like flavor enhancers for language: They can make bad ideas seem extraordinarily clever, because listeners don’t think too hard when they hear pretty words. They often just assume the words are true.

One good indication that musical language is a poor, even negative indicator of truth is that we often use it to say things that aren’t literally true. There are several famous aphorisms, like “An apple a day keeps the doctor away,” that are wrong but broadly accepted because they seem nice to say, while other sayings, like Johnnie Cochran’s infamous defense of O. J. Simpson, “If it doesn’t fit, you must acquit,” are memorable yet misleading. But it is precisely because of their musicality that we accept these statements, broadly constructed, as truths. People process the rhyme, and then they seek the reason.

For better or worse, this very book belongs loosely to a genre of nonfiction that a critic might call a “gospel of success.” Most of these books resell common sense. The author takes a piece of conventional wisdom that the reader has already intuited and repackages it inside fresh stories. It’s a bit like “intuition regifting”: You already know this lesson, but here it is in new wrapping paper. In Dale Carnegie’s 1936 bestseller How to Win Friends and Influence People, many of the most shared lines are musical, particularly playing with antithesis and chiasmus. (I’ve bolded the repetition and italicized the alterations, to accentuate the repetitious effect.)

It would seem that the key to catchy writing is simple. Just write in pairs. Or, to honor Carnegie’s legacy: “To be remembered, be repetitive.” Or if that’s not sticky enough, invoke the rhyme-as-reason effect: “To write a line that people use, make your idea break in twos.”

There is good and bad in this. By turning arguments into spoken music—and making poetry out of policy—antimetabole and its cousins can make important and complicated ideas go down easily. But they can also wave a magic wand over frivolous and dubious ideas, turning something questionable into something catchy.

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How exactly does repetition make music out of sound? I had a theory, and I called Diana Deutsch. Perhaps, I proposed, music is an illusion conjured out of the cacophony of sound by repetition. Just as the rhyme-as-reason effect can create meaning out of meaningless tripe, perhaps repetition makes listeners hear something that isn’t there.

To my surprise, Deutsch insisted that the opposite is true. In her studies of that now famous phase “sometimes behave so strangely,” the people who listened to the most repetitions were also the best at imitating its real sound. They weren’t singing a song that appeared out of thin air. Instead, repetition helped them hear the rhythm and tone of the spoken sentence more clearly. Deutsch was not trying to sing, and yet her voice produced this musical verse.

As Deutsch spoke to me, I listened for the furtive music in her sentences. But I couldn’t hear it. Ordinary listeners struggle to pay explicit attention to the tones and rhythms of their interlocutors. They devote more of their focus to the rest of the “speech stream”—the meaning of the sentences and the intent of the speaker.

Repetition redirects attention to the sound of speech itself—the pitch of the voice, the rhythm of the stops, the secret melodies of conversation. The speech-to-song effect is considered an illusion, but if there is a hidden melody embedded in all language, then it’s cacophony that is the illusion. The strange truth is that all speech is composed of microscopic melodies and undiscovered songs. It just takes a little repeating to hear the music.