From the quite excellent mailing list/webpage Word Spy, a word for my perpetual condition:
earworm (EER.wurm) n.
A song or tune that repeats over and over inside a person’s head.
Also: ear-worm, ear worm.
Example Citation
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“I couldn’t get the song out of my head. It’s like a broken
record,” Clark said Thursday while shopping at the Galleria at
Tyler mall in Riverside. “I keep humming it, and you know, I
don’t even like Prince’s music.”
Her experience reflects a phenomenon shared by the vast majority
of people, according to an ongoing study at the University of
Cincinnati. Nearly everybody has been mentally tortured at one
point in their lives by an “earworm” — a tune that keeps
repeating itself over and over in their heads.
The research also indicates that people who get the most
earworms tend to listen to music frequently and have neurotic
habits, such as biting pencils or tapping fingers.
–Hieu Tran Phan, “‘Sticky tune’ hits a chord with many,” The
Press-Enterprise, March 4, 2003
Backgrounder
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The term “earworm” is the literal English translation of the German
word “ohrwurm” (see the earliest citation, below, for more). An
earworm is also sometimes called a “sticky tune.”
Earliest Citation
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If a meme is a cluster of semantic symbols that propagates through a
human population in a social manner — similar to the way a gene is a
combination of biochemical symbols that propagates through a human
population in a genetic manner — a sudden, wildly popular, new
addition to “the hit parade’ can be seen as a kind of meme When the
medium of radio and the recording industry that grew up alongside it
created a system for propagating musical themes through a population,
a new phenomenon became possible — the “overnight hit.” The idea of
a “hit” isn’t untranslatable, since most cultures have a word for the
winner of a competition. But the idea of a tune, a melody, a
combination of musical sounds that seems to be on everybody’s lips at
the same time, that spreads through a society as rapidly as a
respiratory infection, and seems to invasively seize and occupy space
in peoples minds until they finally succeed inforgetting it, merits a
word of its own.
The Germans use the word Ohrwurm (rhymes with “door worm,” where the
“w” is pronounced like a “v”) to denote these cognitively infectious
musical agents. Whenever somebody complains to you that he just can’t
keep the latest pop tune from running through his head, tell him he
can dispel it by calling it by name and by thinking about the
original German meaning, which captures some of the mnemonicalli
parasitical connotations of the word, for Ohrwurm literally means
“ear worm” and is also used to refer to a kind of worm that can crawl
into the ear.
–Howard Rheingold, “Untranslatable words,” The Whole Earth Review,
December 22, 1987
Oh joy! A diagnosis!
Voice in my head (or earworm if you like): Ole Paus – Blues for Pyttsann Jespersens pårørende