1.4.2 TABLE 2: Controlled and Uncontrolled Variables
1.5 Control Used for Comparison
This experiment investigates the effect of different type of background music (rock, jazz, orchestral, strings and no music) on a students’ ability to memorize and recall a list of words? The independent variable is the type of music based on dissonance. Therefore, the control experiment would be where participants do not listen to music.
1.6 Apparatus and Materials
1.6.1 TABLE 3: Apparatus and Materials
1.7 Protocol and Protocol Diagram
1.8 Procedure
- Informed consent was to be collected from each participant at least one day prior to the experiment.
- Find a room which excludes disturbing factors such as noise and movement.
- Collect the apparatuses to start the experiment. (refer to 1.6 Apparatus and Materials)
- Once all the apparatuses and materials relevant to the experiment are ready for use, allow the participants to enter the room and sit randomly around the room. (at least a table length between each participant)
- Read out the briefing statement and address the issue of ethics.
- Hand out the first word list face down. Give out pencils to any participant who does not have any.
- Once each participant has a list; allow students to turn word list over and start stopwatch.
- Allow participants 2 minutes to memorize word list in silence.
- After 2 minutes, tell participants to stop studying, and collect the word list.
- Ask the participants to sit in silence for 60 seconds.
- During this 60 second of silence, pass out blank ¼ sheets of paper to each participant for them to list the recalled words.
- Once the 60 seconds of silence is up, ask students to recall as many words as possible in one minute without talking with other participants.
- After the 60 seconds of recall is over, collect participants’ papers.
- Repeat steps 6 through 13 (inclusive) four more times, but instead of the 60 second silence during the recall period, play one minute of each kind of music. (rock, jazz, orchestral, strings)
- The order should not be in ascending nor descending order of dissonance as participants may anticipate what type of background music is next which may decrease the effectiveness of background music. Thus the order may be like the following example: rock, orchestral, jazz, strings
- Read the debriefing statement as well as ethical considerations at the end
2. Data Collection and Processing
2.1 Recording Raw Data
2.1.1: TABLE 4: Qualitative Data
This table displays the number of words recalled for each participant influenced by different background music as well as the participant’s age, gender and culture.
2.1.2 TABLE 5: Quantitative Data
There were ingroups and outgroups in that not everyone was friends with each other. An ingroup can be defined as an exclusive circle of people with a common purpose. An out-group is a social group towards which an individual feels contempt, opposition, or a desire to compete. This was evident as the participants split into four distinct groups: year 11 males, year 11 females, year 10 males, and year 10 females.
It was clearly stated at the start of the experiment that talking is not permitted throughout the experiment. However, participants in each ‘ingroup’ talked to each other during the recall section of this experiment. The participants were instantly told to stop talking. In addition, conformity was used as once one ‘ingroup’ started discussing results; the other groups conformed to them and also discussed results.
It should also be noted that in the memory stage; a few participants used fingers to help them recall memory. It was also predicted that the participants constantly stared at the screen (list of words) without shifting their view. However, that was not the case as all participants either closed their eyes or looked at the ground or ceiling.
In the interval section of the experiment, (where the participants had to listen to music without doing anything for 60 seconds) most participants closed their eyes and some even put their head on the table. Although some participants attempted to block their ears, they were immediately prohibited in doing so.
In the one minute of recall, it was possible to see that all the participants commenced writing immediately and kept writing at a fast constant speed for five seconds. When thirty seconds have passed, most participants have stopped writing. It was also possible to see that some participants recalled a few more words by looking around the classroom. However, the fact that some of the participants wrote some words after 30 seconds triggered the discussion with the in-groups about the results as well as the conformity of other in-groups which followed.
2.2 Processing Raw Data
2.2.1 Sample Calculations
A worked example has been shown for the average and standard deviation of the rock background music investigation. The average is the central tendency of data and the standard deviation is a statistical measure of the precision of series of repetitive measurements. (C. Wylie 2010) Therefore, the average number of words will be used to reflect on that particular investigation’s data as a whole.
The average is a good reflection of the rock investigation data. In addition, the standard deviation is fairly small; indicating the small amount of error for this investigation.
2.3 Presenting Processed Data
A table and bar graph was decided to be used to process and present the data in the form that shows up later in this section. There are two main reasons as to why these two methods were the best option. The first reason is because the reader will easily be able to see and analyse the data for themselves if it was in a graph. The second reason is that by using a table, it is simple to compare the data as opposed to a pie graph. Therefore, a table and bar graph is the best method to record the data. In addition, these results were processed through Microsoft Excel 2007 due to its ability to calculate the mean and standard deviation.
2.3.1 TABLE 6: Results Table
The table below presents the average and standard deviation of the number of words recalled obtained from each investigation with different types of music.
2.3.2 GRAPH 1: Results Graph
This graph shows the average number of words recalled for different types of background music. The graph displays that the control experiment had the most number of words recalled with 16 words. The investigation involving the orchestral background music had the second highest number of words recalled with 15. Then the average number of words recalled for the strings, jazz and rock investigations were 12, 11 and 10 words respectively.
3. Conclusion
3.1 Conclusion
The aim of this investigation was to investigate if the type of background music (rock, jazz, orchestral, strings and no music) played during a memorization and recollection process have an effect on the student’s ability to memorize and recall a list of 20 words. By carrying out this laboratory experiment, the aim was achieved. The hypothesis was that the more dissonant the background music is, the more it weakens the student’s ability to memorize and thus, the less number of words are recalled. Therefore, no music will have the highest memory recall; followed by strings, orchestral, jazz and rock (lowest memory recall). The majority of the hypothesis was supported, as the results showed that music does create distractions which weaken memorization during memorization and recollection processes. However, when ordering the types of background music from predicted highest to lowest number of words recalled; instead of the results displaying: control, strings, orchestral, jazz and rock; the practical results provided: control, orchestral, strings, jazz and rock. In addition, the average number of words recalled for the orchestral investigation was 15, and the strings were 12. Thus, there is an average of three words difference. This suggests that there was a major error in the hypothesis in which many errors may have caused these unexpected results.
3.1.1 The Orchestral and Strings Investigations
It was predicted that more words will be recalled with string background music than orchestral music; but that was not the case, instead it was switched around. One explanation for this distortion is the popularity and familiarity with the songs. The songs chosen for this experiment all do not include a voice, (or are removed) and they are: orchestral song: two steps from Hell – Heart of Courage, Strings song: Vivaldi – Spring, Rock song: ACDC – Back in Black, Jazz song: Pink panther theme song. On the 6th of November 2011, the views on Youtube showed that Heart of Courage (orchestral) had 4,287,348 views, Spring (strings) had 4,903,255 views, Back in Black (rock) had 5,745,711 views and the Pink panther theme song had by far the highest number of views with 11,214,683 views. Although using the number of views on Youtube is not a very accurate way to determine how popular it is; it can be used as an indication of how popular and thus how familiar participants are, with the song. As the orchestral music (Heart of Courage) had the least number of views, participants were unfamiliar with the song. This allows the participants to not relate to the song as much as other familiar songs and thus is a less of a distraction than familiar music.
However, the participants for this experiment were all aged between 15 to 16 years of age. Therefore naturally, songs such as the Pink panther theme song and back in black by ACDC are better known to participants than songs such as Heart of Courage and Spring. Therefore, this may explain the fact that rock and jazz background music produced the least amount of recalled words. In conclusion, the familiarity of the song significantly affects the number of words recalled. The more familiar a participant is to the song, the less words are recalled.
3.2 Evaluating Procedures
3.2.1 Reliability and Errors
This experiment was performed on a group of students from the Queensland academies for health sciences. The age range was from 15 to 16 years of age. 11 female and 9 male students participated. In addition, 11 were Asian and 9 were Non-Asian. The gender ratio as well as the cultural ratio was quite equally balanced. However, the age range was between 15 to 16 years of age. Thus, the generalisation to the wider society is not possible. Also, it should be noted that only 20 participants took part in the experiment, which further limits the potential to generalise to a broader community.
As for the types of music, as explained earlier, familiarity of the song to the individual significantly affects the memory recall of words as the more familiarity, the less number of words recalled. Another piece of evidence that distorts the reliability of results is the fact that each song had a different tempo. Psychological research has shown that music with fast tempo (Pink Panther and Back in Black) does not help memory recall. Although these two songs are not naturally fast, when compared to the songs Heart of courage and Spring, it is relatively faster. In other words they do not all have the same tempos causing inconsistencies with the rehearsal stage of the experiment.
Another type of reliability can be based on the word lists. In order to equalize the difficulty in each list of words; commonly used words will be chosen to be on the list. These word lists were selected from the categories animals, colours, food and common school objects all mixed together. Each word was no more than three syllables long. Therefore there were only four categories in which words were chosen from. Thus the words are reliable. However, one problem that arose during the method section was how to conduct the experiment. The fact that five independent variables had to be tested caused trouble as it leads to only two choices. The first choice was to split the number of participants into five groups (20/5 = 4 participants per group). This was not an option as it would significantly decrease the number of participants. Therefore the second choice was chosen; which was to use the same 20 participants but make them recall 5 different word lists under 5 different types of background music. The problem with this is that it makes the participants remember 4 different word lists which may be a troublesome task. For example, some participants may still have remembered some of the words from the previous list which could trigger some words from the next list. The participants may also complain that they have to memorize too many words and as a result perform poorly on the last few memorization tasks.
A major strength was that it was a laboratory experiment which allowed strict control over the experimental variables as most disturbing factors were removed. The independent variable was easily manipulated which produced differing dependent variables which then provides a greater chance to replicate the study. Being a laboratory experiment, it allowed strict control over extraneous variables. Although repeated measures was used, it was still possible to ensure that order effects, such as boredom and rehearsal, was not an issue as the participants only participated once for each type of background music. However, demand characteristics were more prominent as the participants were aware about the memory recall test. An another strength of this experiment is that it can be related to education as students are now aware that listening to music does not help memory and revising school work.
Another strength in the experiment was the broad range of culture differences. In Tang’s psychology study (2006) he noticed brain differences between English and Chinese readers affecting other task. Also the Chinese language has fewer words representing numbers that may give native Chinese speakers the advantage in working memory. Thus, culture may have affected the way one processes memory.
3.3 Improvements
Suggestions for improvements were given for each of the mentioned errors. The main objective is to improve the accuracy of this experiment. In order to do so, it would be wise to increase the number participants and widen the age range. Another improvement is to choose songs with similar tempos and are all common, popular songs that most people should be familiar with. But otherwise, as this is a laboratory experiment, there are not many other ways to improve the ecological validity as normally, people do not memorize a list of 20 words given that are given to them with a set time under the influence of background music. It is also possible to perhaps give gaps between each of the experiments. So, for example after the rock experiment has finished, the next day, conduct the jazz experiment using the same participants but a different list of words. This may drastically allow the participants to perform at their best for each memory task. However, there are many limitations that come with this improvement as it will be set over 5 days and if even one participant does not come to the experiment; then it is not possible to hold the experiment. As a future opportunity, it would be interesting to discover the other types of music such as techno and heavy rock.
4. Appendix
Appendix I : 5 Different lists of twenty words
Appendix II: Briefing statement
You have been chosen to take part in a short memory experiment. Shortly, you will be given a pencil and a question paper faced down. Do not fear, the task is not hard. Simply try and memorize all the words on the screen. There are twenty words. After this, you must sit there silently whilst listening to music that will be played for one minute. Then you will be required to write down as many words as you can remember.
You have 2 minutes to memorize the words on the screen. Start now!
(2 minutes later)
Please sit there quietly for 1 minute and listen to the music.
(1 minute later)
Okay, now recall as many words as you remember.
(1 minute later)
*Do this process 5 times with different music playing in the background in this order, rock, orchestral, control, jazz and strings
Appendix III: Debriefing statement
Thank you for participating in my biology experiment; on the effect of background music on memory recall. The results from this experiment will be kept anonymous. If anyone has any problems, you can contact me through my email Thank you for your participation.
