Why Pop Music Works: Phase-Locking, Repetition, and Reversibility in Musical Emotion

This paper proposes a phase-regulatory framework for understanding musical engagement under repeated exposure. Rather than treating popular music conventions as stylistic formulas, the analysis reinterprets hooks, repetition-with-variation, verse–chorus structures, groove, and reset mechanisms as strategies for managing synchronization and reversibility over time. Central to the framework is the concept of a Critical Resonance Goldilocks Zone (CRGZ)—a regime in which coupling between listener and musical structure is sufficiently strong to sustain engagement, yet sufficiently reversible to prevent premature saturation and fatigue. Musical pleasure, fatigue, comfort, thrill, and unease are described not as genre-dependent effects, but as outcomes of how imbalance is entered, maintained, and resolved within this resonance space. The paper introduces phase-locking value (PLV) as a conceptual measure of synchronization, and distinguishes sustainable engagement from failure modes such as fatigue, phase death, and earworms, understood as cases of PLV saturation combined with reversibility loss or unclosed phase loops. Listener-dependent CRGZ boundaries are emphasized, explaining why structurally similar materials can produce divergent experiences across developmental stages and contexts. Beyond individual listening, the framework extends to social and collective musical experiences. Sing-alongs, concerts, ritual music, and rhythm-centered traditions are described as collective phase fields that redistribute regulatory load across participants, enabling high-intensity synchronization without structural collapse. Rather than replacing predictive coding, entrainment theory, or existing music cognition models, the framework integrates these approaches within a unified phase-dynamical geometry. Its contribution lies in clarifying why repetition can be engaging or exhausting, why simplicity can both aid access and accelerate fatigue, and how popular music reliably engineers return paths that sustain replayability. This work is an exploratory contribution situated within the IPCSALT–UPF phase-based meta-framework.