Same. This is partly why SomaFM (esp. Space Station Soma, Drone Zone, and Mission Control) and soundtracks are my jam.

I think it's also partly why I can't stand Vivaldi or Hiromi. Vivaldi writes classical pop -- so heavy on melody that it may as well be choral. It's easy to sing, and sounds like song, so it gets stuck in the ear. Hiromi, in turn, plays the piano quite literally like she's singing (honestly, I think she's a musical acrobat with no feel for the piano as an instrument), which results in ear worms for the same reason.

Bill Evans, by contrast, is so chock full of harmonic complexity and color that it's physically impossible to sing along with him. I never tire of him. Same for Wayne Shorter and Bach, though for different reasons.

And I just realized that this is probably partly why I hate musical theater so fervently.

Ditto the sibling comment about this happening to me for instrumental music. I have thousands of hooks floating around my head. I whistle and sing when I walk around if nobody is within earshot. 90% of the time I wake up with a melody in my head that won't go away. I kind of like it because it's developed my musical ability in a passive, cumulative way.

When people mention “intrusive thoughts” this is what comes to my mind.

On behalf of everyone else in the world, please invest in headphones.

Broadcasting in this way is boorish and the kind of thing emotionally stunted people do to inflict their will upon others. I'm not saying you're necessarily like that, but you're 'wearing their uniform' so to speak.

Also, do a kickflip.

So I end up with real high quality Japanese Breakfast and MP3-quality Pixies.

Tony Joe White - Even Trolls Love Rock and Roll https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9fJMNJTEhuw

The traditional (high-walled) cube farm may be ugly, but it's also one where an employee could often work at their desk with relatively few distractions. If you're not going to build private offices, they're not that awful of a compromise for enabling focus.

Then in the past decade or two, we had the open-office trend, and changed the office to one full of endless visual and auditory distractions making focus difficult.

Employees wearing headphones at work is an obvious attempt by many to reduce the distractions that bad office design has created.

The music is quite sparsely melodic though and easy to miss

The hypothesis being tested is that in the absence of social interaction, people will turn to surrogates in order to make up for the perceived lack. Specifically, they test if music can be such a surrogate. They do some surveys and a kind of silly experiment to provide evidence that yes- it can.

The reason it is rightly called pointless is that it brings nothing actionable to the table.

You cannot extract advice from showing evidence for a common-sense observation: If you feel a certain lack, activities you find pleasurable can diminish that lack.

And look at the experimental setup: They make people play an online game with others where certain people are excluded from playing. It turns out that people who are hyped from listening to their favorite song found this less jarring, hence showing that music can be a "social buffer", i.e. make up for a perceived social exclusion.

Let everyone individually conclude how insightful this experiment is.

EDIT: Misunderstood the nature of the "Cyberball" experiment, fixed