Well a number actually

1. I am being asked to do a multi-media presentation, most likely of all the church events of 2007. To do this I want to pick the hit of 2007. Over here in the UK it seems to have been "How to Save a life" by The Fray. Is that the case in the US, where the target audience will be for this presentation or was there another hit that dominated the US pop charts this year?
2. Sometimes we get a tune going around in our heads, which has been discussed on another forum I am a member of. I heard a while ago that there had been some neurological research into this, has anyone got any more info on that?
3. Music of the Spheres - was this just a dead end that Kepler went down, or do planets have a certain "tune" / "set of harmonics" associated with them
4. Has anyone experience of Music as therapy, I remember this concept in the DS9 episode "Chrysalis"

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No idea. Pop today is about cults of personalities and extravagant stage shows. The music (all three chords of it) is incidental.
Sounds like obsessive/compulsive behavior if the tune won't go away.
Another dead end by Kepler, along with his Platonic solids solution to the planetary orbits. His Harmonices Mundi is as arbitrary and nonfunctional as astrology or Bode's "Law". He did make some money by dabbling in astrology.This was touched on in Hitchcock's Vertigo, in which Jimmy Stewart loses it after losing Madeleine to death. Midge's two comments sum it up pretty well:

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Ummm..

Smack That - Akon




<kidding>

No clue what the popular song was in the US. I don't hear anything that's not on my hard drive.

As for getting a song stuck in your head, here is what I've found to be true for me. The song will be in there for hours unless I can either get all the way through the lyrics, or sing the first verse of "Copacabana" by Barry Manilow.

My theory on the first remedy is that your mind will keep trying to get to the end of the song for whatever reason. Once it does, it's happy. Maybe this is a little OCD, but that's the pattern I've noticed.

For the second option, I think that "Copacabana" is the one song on earth that is both catchy enough to get stuck in your head, and irritating enough for you mind to give up without a fight.

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A Geek will think he can use that to pick up a girl in a bar.
A Dork knows he can't pick up the girl with it, but will hang around for hours anyway, just in case she asks.
She might. You never know.

As for my second question, I have now found

This news story

and this one

I knew there had been some research on this one.

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Pop today is about cults of personalities and extravagant stage shows. The music (all three chords of it) is incidental.



You got that right!

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Maybe but I do need to confirm if "How to Save a life" by the Fray was a number one hit in the US this year, like I am told it was in the UK. If not which song dominated the US pop charts this year.

I am on a time clock on this one.

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Peaked at 14

Billboard

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A Nerd can figure out how long it will take the original Enterprise traveling at warp 6.5 to travel from Regulus to Antares.
A Geek will think he can use that to pick up a girl in a bar.
A Dork knows he can't pick up the girl with it, but will hang around for hours anyway, just in case she asks.
She might. You never know.

The hottest shows barely pay homage to music at all. A lot of them do not even have the musicians or instruments on stage. It's 4 or 5 teeny boppers on stage jumping around and singing. Doesn't anybody look around and wonder where the music is even coming from? The music barely even registers, it's more about the band meeting some marketer's well researched definition of cool and convincing the kids that by attending, they are now cool too.

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Don of Borg - Cool, Calm, Collective.

"Within the next generation I believe that the world's leaders will discover that infant conditioning and narco-hypnosis are more efficient, as instruments of government, than clubs and prisons, and that the lust for power can be just as completely satisfied by suggesting people into loving their servitude as by flogging them and kicking them into obedience." -- Aldous Huxley

See the Billboard.com link a couple of posts above this one; HTSaL was never #1. (The singing was terrible; constantly off-pitch and drifting up or down on every syllable with slurred pronunciation. It was like a drunk trying to sing. And it was irritatingly overplayed for anybody who watched whichever TV network has "Grey's Anatomy" because they used it to advertise that show on TV far more than it was played on the radio.) You can also probably find out at that website what song was #1 the longest or sold the most copies or something like that. But there was no one song that "dominated".

Why does the soundtrack for your presentation need to be The One Big Hit Of The Year? Why not pick the most suitable one from the top 20-50 or so? About the same number of people would still be familiar with it, and the lower-ranked ones (higher numbers) would be less overplayed by now.

Last year I did a 21st Anniversary video and because it was 2006 that it fell in, I ended up using Chasing Cars by Snow Patrol which seemed to dominate. I understand it was on Greys Anatomy as well. The other reason it seemed to be the hit of 2006, was that it was used for the end of UK Big Brother compilation of memorable moments. This year they chose HTSaL, and as I kept hearing it on musak I assumed it must be the hit of 2007.

As for the general point of using the hit of the year, I had also seen this done on one of those Hogmany shows where they did a review of the year clips, to a particular hit that may have been the number one for the most time that year. I was trying to follow in that tradition.

I did look at another link, and one hit that seemed to be in theUK charts for a long time was Umbrella by Rhiana ???

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Of course, you can map audible frequencies to the planets' cyclic behavior, and you can call it music. No harmonics appear to be naturally involved.

Listen: Kepler's Music of the Spheres, a joint composition by Paul Viotti and Ralph Abraham (MP3s there).

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0 1 1 0 1 0 0 1 1 0 0 1 0 1 1 0 1 0 0 1 0 1 1 0 0 1 1 0 1 0 0 1 1 0 0 1 0 1 1 0 0 1 1 0 1 0 0 1 0 1 1 0 1 0 0 1 1 0 0 1 0 1 1 0....

Oh darn you, now that's on my mind! Arghhhhhhh. Must . . . listen . . . to . . . something . . . else . . quickly!

There, that's better.

I think it's a common phenomenon for people to associate a tune with a place or a time. That is, hearing the tune reminds them of the place/time. Some years ago I had a very strange thing happen to me. I had been working on a road layout on difficult terrain with several different options, and so I was doing a lot of reconaissance, weighing of options, etc over several days. Very intense. Well, on one of those days there had been a song on the radio in the morning, and it stayed in my mind all day. It was something I hadn't heard in years, and was unlikely to hear again any time soon. I didn't finish the work that day, and was reassigned to another task for a few weeks. Anyway, when I finally got back there to finish the job, I was hiking in to the area, came upon a small wetland that I'd been by earlier, and there it was: the tune was back in my head. Today, I do not remember what the tune was. Perhaps I'll have to go back there again to get the same pattern of neurons firing.

"Y...M...C...A!..."

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*

Okay, enough already!

Well, thanks for reminding me to put a bunch of CD's in the pickup, as I'm about to head out on a three hour drive, and I don't need that on my mind. . . . No wait - three hour drive -> three hour tour. . . man, where are those CD's?

. . . .mutters something about a stupid show from the 60's . . .

"How to Save a Life" was on the radio a lot here. It's an okay song, but there are better.

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"Carl Sagan sent a message to ET,
Neil Armstrong walked in the Sea of Tranquility
Steve Squyers built Spirit and Opportunity
Dan Haylen upchucked in zero gravity." -Brent Simon, The Space Camp Song

Mike Oldfield is bringing out a CD called Music of the Spheres, a classical work based on this idea. No real science behind this concept. Also none implied in the album (he's not pretending to have used certain well-calculated frequencies or anything, just "this is my idea of what the music from the creator of the universe would sound like"), it's just a concept suitable as source of inspiration these days . The album is delayed, will probably be january.

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Our minister first thought it had slang in it which were swear words and when I showed him the transcript of the lyrics he did not think it was appropriate, and thought I ought to use a piece of music I used for another church video.

This means I have had to run with the Spice Girls reunion song, until that one is vetoed

Any other ideas of singles from the 2007 charts?

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Some answers:

1) Call me jaded, if you like, but I would think that any current popular song wouldn't be appropriate for a presentation detailing church events. And, The Spice Girls just might get you excommunicated.

2) As far as a tune which sticks (no pun) in one's head, I can offer no scientific information. However, I will relay a story I read in The Real Frank Zappa Book. While in high school there was a song he liked and he asked his music teacher why he liked it. The teacher's response...parallel fifths. I still don't know what it means. For what it's worth...

3) Can't help you here.

4) Yes. I have much experience with music as therapy. Playing the drums is great therapy. You get to hit stuff in a socially acceptable manner. You don't even really have to be that good.