Spice Girls' 'Wannabe' is the catchiest UK hit single ever.
So says an experiment conducted by the Museum Of Science And Industry (MOSI) in Manchester, England. they developed an interactive game — Hooked On Music — as part of a study to discover the secrets of memorable music.
Wannabe, which spent seven weeks at #1 in 1996, scored top spot with participants recognising the song in 2.3 seconds, compared with an average of five seconds for others.
Data from more than 12,000 participants was collected from the online experiment, where people who played the game were asked if they recognised a song, which was randomly selected from more than 1,000 clips of best-selling songs, dating from the 1940s until the present day.
Second was Lou Bega's Mambo No 5, which was identified in an average of 2.48 seconds. Survivor's Eye of the Tiger was third, with an average time of 2.62 seconds. Just Dance by Lady Gaga was the fourth most catchy song.
The Hooked on Music concept was designed by Ashley Burgoyne, a computational musicologist from the University of Amsterdam, Netherlands, and colleagues. "You may only hear something a couple of times yet 10 years later you immediately realise that you have heard it before," he told BBC News. "Yet other songs, even if you have heard them a lot, do not have this effect."
Also speaking with BBC News, Manchester Science Festival director, Dr Marieke Navin, said "people's appetite to participate in real scientific research and the experiment's need for a large, diverse group of participants made it an ideal addition to the festival's programme. It does not matter whether or not people want to do the science per se; they can just play an online game for fun."
"It has a wide appeal for gamers, or for people who just like music and want to test their knowledge and how good they are at recognising hooks.
"While people are playing, it is actually an experiment and scientists are collecting data. This allows the scientist to test different hypotheses about the musical hook."
