Popular Music Experiments

This laboratory experiment aims to investigate the effects of lyrics in popular music on the ability to recall information as a replication of a study conducted by Blanton, Elmer and Yates (2006). In this study, 16 participants, ranging from 16-18 years old of mixed gender and race taking the International Baccalaureate program at a private international school in Singapore, studied a list of 32 words while listening to music with lyrics, music without lyrics and then were asked to recall the words in silence. The independent variable is the two conditions: lyrical and non lyrical and the dependent variable is the number of correctly recalled words from a word list. The results were consistent with the results from the original study as the

In the study, the participants were asked to study a list of 32 words while listening to music with lyrics, without lyrics, or no music and then were asked to recall the words in silence. There were some differences among the means of the three conditions. Inconsistent with their hypothesis, however, those who listened to music with lyrics recalled significantly more words than those who listened to music without lyrics. They concluded that this was due to musical preferences as for those participants that enjoyed the genre of music that was selected, the music would not have been distracting and thus resulting a higher mean of correctly remembered

Participants were split into two conditions using a random number generator

2. Briefing letter was read out

3. Participants signed the consent forms

4. Hard copy of the word list was given out

5. Lyrical version of the song was played (Lyrical condition)

6. When the music started, the participants were given 5 minutes to memorize the list of words

7. When the music ended, the word list was taken away from the participants

8. Empty piece of paper and pen were handed out to each participants

9. The participants were given 5 minutes to write down the words from memory in silence

10. The paper was collected after three minutes

11. Debriefing letter was read out

12. Repeat steps 2 to 11 with instrumental version of the song with the second condition

Results

The data collected was ratio data and therefore the results can be analyzed using descriptive statistics. As the measure of central tendency, the mean is an appropriate measure to show the center of distribution. The mean can be misleading as it is normally affected by extreme values; however, the mean was still chosen to find the central tendency for the word recalled of each condition, as there were no extreme values. The standard deviation was also calculated to show the variability in my results, to consider the