Do you belt out your favourite song in the bath when it comes on the radio? Sing along as you're driving, at a gig, cleaning the loo or just walking to work plugged into your Shuffle? And what is it about a song that catches our attention and makes us want sing our hearts out?

It's a question that led to a lot of hanging out in nightclubs for musicologist Dr Alisun Pawley, as she tried to find the answer. Clearly, some research projects are more fun than others.

"I got the idea when I was living in Newcastle and on a night out," she explains. "I was watching people singing along to "Hey baby," by DJ Otzi – big huddles of men really going for it. The physicality of it, the vigour ... it was really tribal."

Pawley, an academic working at Kendal College, who performs and teaches as well as analysing music, wondered exactly what elements in music make a song particularly sing-alongable.

To find out the answer, it was time to go clubbing. "I did 30 nights' research – six nights at five venues – to get a good range of demographic," she explains. "We chose a small pub in York, a student nightclub, a trendy gay bar in Leeds, an indie rock bar in Manchester and a big nightclub in Kendal."

With a research assistant to help her do the count, Pawley hit the dancefloor "undercover", with a dictaphone that passed for a mobile, and started monitoring who was singing along to what.

She also noted factors such as time of night, whether it was a weekday or a weekend, how well a song was doing in the charts and when it was released – all elements that might influence how willing people were to fling off their inhibitions and give their lungs a workout.

"I had an internal rule that if about 80% of the people were singing, I was allowed to sing myself, so I wasn't putting anyone off," she laughs.

Given that each track was only a few minutes long, assessing how many people had got sucked into a catchy number was tricky in a dark nightclub environment – if it was small numbers, she counted during the chorus when most people were singing, but with larger groups, it had to be an estimate.

Another problem arose when Pawley didn't know the name of the track straight away, though a phone app solved that one; recording the music then playing it into her phone allowed the app to identify most songs.

Thousands of people were monitored for their responses to over 1,000 songs and, perhaps predictably, the student night had the highest percentage of people singing along. The lowest proportion of warblers were found in the cool indie bar in Manchester. But it was the factors that incentivised people to sing that really took Pawley by surprise.

"I thought the musical structures of the song would be more influential, but it turns out the most important thing is the vocal aspect – how the singer sings," she says.

The subject of a song and the sentiment described by the lyrics don't really matter, either. Whether you're singing miserably or happily about love, banging out a political war cry or rapping about how society has treated you wrong, what makes a tune really catchy, Pawley found, is if it's sung in a high voice, with lots of energy, by a male singer, using clear consonants so you can make out the words, and without much elaborate dancing around the melody.

"One of my hypotheses was that the catchy songs would fall in a smaller range of notes, so it would be comfortable for both males and females to sing along to – but that wasn't significant," says Pawley. "Bon Jovi in Livin' On A Prayer goes up really high at the end, but it doesn't put people off."

The more words a singer can manage in one breath, the more likely ordinary punters are to succumb to a sing-song, and the more sounds there are in a chorus, the more infectious it gets.

Once she had worked out which songs got most people going – Queen's We Are The Champions came in at number one – Pawley gave her results to Goldsmiths music psychologist Dr Daniel Müllensiefen, who extracted the data that explains the blueprint behind a catchy song.

A few songs in the top 10 came as a surprise. "The Sum 41 and Wheatus songs are the most surprising in terms of not being 'classic' anthems," says Pawley. "They were very popular in the student nights I observed at the time the research was carried out, which demonstrates that more 'niche' songs can be popular sing-along songs within certain subcultures at a certain moment in time."

While nobody joining in their favourite chorus in a nightclub will realise it, Müllensiefen says that every musical hit is reliant on maths, science, engineering and technology for its effects.

"We've discovered that there's a science behind the sing-along and a special combination of neuroscience, maths and cognitive psychology can produce the elusive elixir of the perfect sing-along song," he explains. "We hope our study will inspire musicians of the future to crack the equation of the textbook tune."