We Listened to the Same Song for 24 Consecutive Hours. Here’s What Happened.

GABE SHUMWAY: Have you ever had a song stuck in your head that you just couldn’t shake? Perhaps it lasted for an hour, maybe two. But what if you were forced to listen to that song for 24 hours in a row? Whether it’s for curiosity, the pursuit of a story, or just pure madness, that’s the decision we made. 

But we still had to pick a song. For copyright purposes, it had to be in the public domain, and after an extensive search, we found one. Now the problem here is that it was only the lyrics in the public domain. Lucky for us, the WNUR News staff has an amateur jazz singer. 

EDWARD SIMON CRUZ: All right, so we’re here with John Kowalski. Me, Gabe, John, and I guess Krishna is joining us too. We’re in the bathroom.

JOHN KOWALSKI: A-one, a-two, a-one, two, three four… [singing] Row, row, row your boat, gently down the stream / Merrily, merrily, merrily, merrily, life is but a dream

SHUMWAY: Now that the tune was set, it began to set in just how much this would actually take. With a clip of just 11.26 seconds, we would listen to this tune about 7,700 times. But, like the ticking of a clock in the background of a room, could we merely tune it out like background noise? Could we continue focusing on work?

There was only one way to find out.

CRUZ: Before we began, we prepared an unlisted YouTube video to play on loop, and we agreed on some ground rules. We could adjust the volume of the music as long as we could still hear it. We could move around, but we had to have an AirPod with the music playing in at least one ear. And we could fall asleep naturally, but we couldn’t try to get out of hearing the song.

And our news director and executive producer told us we could stop if we had, quote, “homicidal ideations.” After all, several of our peers were concerned that we wouldn’t handle hearing the same song nonstop for 24 hours.

Now, a disclaimer: Please do not try this at home. While we can attest to our experiences and reactions, we can’t say how this will affect others. 

We started at 4:21 p.m. yesterday.

SHUMWAY: This is gonna be our next 24 hours. How do you feel?

CRUZ: Oh, [expletive] me.

CRUZ: Even in the first 15 minutes, we were trying to minimize the damage. This meant we began forming strategies while walking across campus to our home base.

SHUMWAY: What I’ve noticed is that generally if you’re in an active conversation with someone, it’s easier to tune it out, at least for me. 

SHUMWAY: From here, our paths split.

CRUZ: I had a meeting.

SHUMWAY: I went to get dinner alone.

CRUZ: I crashed.

SHUMWAY: I went to class.

CRUZ: I got dinner with John, Krishna, and another friend. Then I went to the gym.

I gotta be honest: I had a rough start. For about an hour, I was lying down, half-napping in our dorm lounge while another friend did work on the side. I’m still not sure how they did it. And then John came in.

JOHN KOWALSKI: [singing] Row, row, row your boat, how are you doing sir? / It’s been an hour or two or more, and he is going sad

[laughing]

CRUZ: Thankfully, my workout went surprisingly well.

CRUZ: It helps me stay focused. It keeps me to a consistent kind of cadence and forces me to kind of keep moving along and focusing on the reps I have to do and timing things out in a very kind of specific kind of way instead of, you know, losing track of things or letting myself get distracted by checking my phone a lot.

CRUZ: The best part? I had to take a shower right after, which meant bringing a speaker into the bathroom with me. And somehow, no one got mad.

SHUMWAY: I wasn’t sure how to feel about listening to this song during a class, much less a three-hour, discussion-heavy one. But the song’s impact came and went as the class went on. After the first hour… 

SHUMWAY: I’ve been able to zone it out mostly. It’s playing fairly quietly. I feel like I’m in my own head about it, and if I wasn’t in my own head, I’d be able to ignore it, but I’m just trying to focus on the content. 

SHUMWAY: After that check-in, however, the hardest part of the class came. My professor gave us 15 minutes to read through a packet that he passed out. When there was other chatter, lecture, or discussion, the song wasn’t bad. When it was just the song and my attempt to read, things got tough, but I persisted. 

SHUMWAY: Overall, could’ve been a lot worse. The class made fun of me for it, but it was all good. My professor found it amusing, so we’re doing well. 

SHUMWAY: But on these long walks back to campus, there was also no other talking. As a result, I discovered an interesting phenomenon. 

SHUMWAY: I realized that I’ve started talking to myself when I’m walking along because the sound of my own voice helps to drown out the sound of John singing. 

SHUMWAY: As for the sound of John himself?

KOWALSKI: How you doing, man? 

SHUMWAY: So we’re six-and-a-half hours in and I’ve just encountered John for the first time. 

KOWALSKI: What’s up? 

SHUMWAY: Honestly, I’m holding up all right, but just seeing you and hearing your voice is more exhausting than usual. You know, usually I can talk to you for a longer period of time but I feel more tired more quickly when speaking with you now. 

KOWALSKI: You know, I take that as a compliment. It means I’m doing my job. 

CRUZ: When we reunited that night, we watched “Groundhog Day” in the dorm lounge. That wasn’t breaking the rules, because we kept playing the song at a lower volume.

I chose the movie on purpose: Just as we were listening to the same song over and over, Bill Murray’s character relives the same day again and again.

“Groundhog Day” is one of my favorite movies, and Gabe enjoyed it too. We did get distracted at certain moments, though.

SHUMWAY: I feel like if the movie is boring or a lot of times when the movie didn’t have active words going on, it bothered me a little bit, or the music, you could hear it more. But when Bill Murray was just being a hilarious dude, I didn’t pay any attention to the music. I zoned it out.

SHUMWAY: As we slept through the night to the sound of the Freevee show “Jury Duty,” we slowly became better at tuning out the music. This continued into our morning routines, where we got breakfast, took showers, and brushed teeth, for example, without being bothered. We can’t speak for the others in the bathroom who heard the song, but no verbal altercations occurred.

CRUZ: These 24 hours were a prime example of habituation in action. Habituation is the process of experiencing a stimulus so often that you get used to it. You may ignore the stimulus or respond less intensely to it.

So, over these 24 hours, we were wondering: Could we ignore the irrelevant stimuli — sorry, John — and continue focusing on the other tasks at hand?

Yes, yes we did. How did we respond at the end?

SHUMWAY/CRUZ QUOTES TO END

SHUMWAY: Merrily, merrily, merrily, merrily, life was indeed but a dream.

For WNUR News, I’m Gabe Shumway.

CRUZ: And I’m Edward Simon Cruz.