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Damn, Summer: How Ice Cream Trucks Entice and Enrage Us

Psychology explains why we can’t resist their jingles or get them out of our heads.
Image: ValeStock/Shutterstock

Ice cream trucks, with their tinny melodies echoing through city streets, are kind of poetic. They’re like beautiful, exhaust-spewing roses with aggravatingly catchy thorns, inspiring as much rage as they do joy—over 7,000 New Yorkers have filed complaints against ice cream trucks in the past four years because of their jingles.

The characteristic song of an ice cream truck announces its arrival on the block and acts as a aural bat signal to sugar-hungry kids, fudge bars dancing in their crazed eyes. There’s not a lot of scholarship out there on ice cream trucks specifically, but using repetitive jingles to associate a product with a piece of music is a tactic well known to advertisers and researchers.

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Classical conditioning is a phenomenon you may have encountered in Psych 101. It occurs when an act like ringing a chime becomes associated with an automatic response like desiring food and salivating. Think Ivan Pavlov’s famous dog experiment, except instead of dogs it’s children, and instead of dog food it’s soft serve. The chimes are still there.

Have you ever actually seen a horde of children, driven wild by the promise of frozen dairy, running out to meet the purveyor of their sweet vice with fists clenched around a bunch of change? You don’t want to get in their way. You can see it in their eyes.

There’s probably a good deal of operant conditioning at play in the allure of the ice cream truck, as well—when voluntary behaviours are reinforced through reward. Say, a block of frozen sugar for obeying the seductive call of the Mister Softee jingle.

Less nefariously and more generally speaking, music acts as a mnemonic device on the brain. That is, it helps us to remember people, events, and things—even our pasts—and improves cognitive abilities. In 30 years, even if you haven’t heard an ice cream truck jingle for decades, god willing, hearing the same tune may trigger vivid memories of white trucks advertising cold cones.

Besides binding gangs of kids to their will, there’s a darker and more annoying side to ice cream truck jingles—sometimes they don’t want to leave your head. Hooky songs are known to cause what researchers have dubbed Involuntary Musical Imagery (INMI).

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INMI is a neural phenomenon, referred to informally as an earworm, that researchers define as “a private, conscious experience of reliving a musical memory without a conscious attempt.” If you hear a song catchy enough to be an earworm once, you might not be able to get it out of your head for a long while after. Research into earworms is a relatively new field, but you don’t need a multiyear study to know that they can be really, really fucking annoying.

In a recent study published in the British Journal of Psychology, survey data showed that earworms are triggered by songs already familiar to the listener in most cases. Most participants noted that earworms stick around for 24 hours or more, much longer than most researchers estimate the brain’s capacity for remembering audio cues to be. And, the study suggests, trying to make them go away is less effective than passively accepting your insufferably melodic fate. In other words, you’re totally screwed.

You might have wondered why ice cream trucks prefer to play hundred year-old standards like “Turkey In the Straw”—which, by the way, like most popular music has horribly racist origins as a staple in minstrelsy—instead of the latest Grimes joint. Contrary to my initial assumption, it’s not because of licensing hangups. It might have more to do with keeping us at the mercy of earworms that won’t let us forget about the ice cream man.

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Ethnomusicologist Daniel Neely wrote in his article “Soft Serve: Charting the aural promise of ice cream truck music” that the technology behind ice cream truck jingles, the Nichols Electronics Digital II chime box, has had a long history of development dedicated to preserving the sounds of the past. Why?

It could be because sound of old tunes emanating from tinny speakers evokes the sepia-toned past of an idealized America, but they’re also likely to be familiar to many passing listeners, making them likely culprits in INMI induction. Even if the songs are new to listeners—like children—hearing them over and over again, predictably, increases the likelihood of an onset of INMI.

Admittedly, it’s pretty unlikely that ice cream truck companies are thinking of any of this darkly manipulative cognitive science when they outfit their trucks with speakers and a chime box. Their jingles probably have more to do with tradition and the simple fact that loud noises grab our attention.

And yet, the proof is in the frozen pudding: The call of the ice cream truck lures and aggravates us quite unlike anything else.

"Damn, Summer" is a semi-regular series exploring the science behind summer's various miseries and pleasures.