Dissonant Music

The aim of this study was to investigate how exposing subjects to varying auditory backgrounds while they were engaged in a memory task affected later recognition performance. Group A scored high as compared to group B. When the students of group A were asked about their experience most of them said that the music helped them to concentrate while giving the test. When they began writing the test, the music was a little distracting because many students were not used to listening to music as they studied but in the course of time the music starting

Music. As our society progresses into the future, we carry it with us everywhere. It’s getting more compact as time goes by. Now we have phones and MP3 players, and maybe sometime in the future we will have microchips that tune into our favorite radio stations, or play our own playlists. But with all of this happening, we keep circling back to the question - should students be allowed to listen to students in class? My answer is, certainly, but - because there always has to be a but, right?

The first section covers a study about how music reduces the anxiety in patients with coronary heart disease, mechanically ventilated patients, cancer patients, and patients awaiting surgical procedures. Secondly, they found that music is becoming more commonly used as an alternative to anti-anxiety drugs. In addition, they also found a study on how blood pressure is affected by music. results show that music only made small reductions in blood pressure when it was used in hypertensive patients to help guide slow and regular breathing. The next study mentioned, shows that music also helps to reduce pain in patients, because music affects the brain's opioid and oxytocin mechanisms, but similar to blood pressure the results show that it only made small reductions. Furthermore, the authors found more studies that show that music helped to improve sleep quality due to muscle-assisted relaxation; and also found studies that showed that pleasant music can activate the reward system to help treat depression that can lead to cardiovascular

While our study was built only to detect an effect of music-dependant memory on immediate recall, it would be interesting to see if results changed after two days, as seen in Smith (1985) and Balch et al. (1992) or when testing the participants on recall after a week, as can be seen in Roediger & Karpicke (2005), or perhaps longer. When you consider the effect of remembering childhood memories when hearing a song from that time in your childhood, it would be especially interesting to conduct a similar study that spanned many years, to determine if music-dependant memory is applicable over a long period of

Music is notorious for enthralling the brain, each genre responsible for provoking a unique brain response. Frequently, teenagers and the like, attempt to make a situation more tolerable by listening to their preferred song choices. It is to their disdain that simultaneously completing a task and listening to music may drastically negate from their performance rather than benefit it. These varied outcomes are correlated to the certain music genre adhered to the scenario. Music genres such as jazz, rock, and classical or ambient all exude effects upon the brain.

The participants who multitasked completed more tasks; this result contradicted the third hypothesis. It was noted that the participants that completed the easy task first had completed more tasks. In the email task, which included the reading comprehension task, there was a large difference between the control group and the classical music group. The participants in the classical music group scored a lower correctly completing the email task. Although there was no statistical significance on the second hypothesis, the data showed that there was an increase in reaction time in the music group when compared to the control group. The classical music group, however, had a higher increased reaction time than the popular music. The authors believe that the participants were more familiar with the popular music than with the classical song. The participants were able to desensitize a subject from the popular songs, but were distracted with the classical

To what extent does music act as a mnemonic device for musically untrained participants when trying to recall song lyrics?

When music plays as significant of a role in American society as it does today, many researchers focus their work on understanding the effects of music on the brain. In the podcast entitled Music, Memories, and the Brain, Steve Mencher interviews Dr. Petr Janata to find out more about how music is associated with human memories. Janata works in the psychology department at the University of California, in Davis, California. Janata’s research suggests that humans unintentionally store and create a soundtrack to their memories.

Prior to each learning phase, the experimenter played three minutes of music: before the first learning phase, the experimenter played three minutes of the song Eine Klein Nacht Musik by Mozart; before the second learning phase, the experimenter played three minutes of the song Adagietto by Mahler. For each learning phase, four 12-word lists were presented on a projector. The words used for the learning phases were taken from the study conducted by Roediger and McDermott (1995). Participants used a computer program called Top Hat to complete the memory

For me music is an outlet. What music I listen to is up to what mood I am in that moment. As much as I listen to music and love it, it can still be a distraction. When it does distract me it is a very focused distraction hence everything goes away.

Over the years, there have been many controversial beliefs about the effects of music. Sherilene M. Carr and Nikki S. Rickard tried to lay some of these controversies to rest by proving that emotional arousing music enhances memory. In the study, The Use of Emotionally Arousing Music to Enhance Memory for Subsequently Presented Images, Carr and Rickard hypothesized that music, which affects us emotionally, will also increase the subjects’ ability to remember images. This information is highly relevant to our society today because music has earned a label of nonimportance. Though studies prove that music can increase test scores, schools are still cutting out their music classes and prohibiting students from listening to music during school. All things considered, this study presents itself with a few faults including the size and diversity of the subject pool as well as the accuracy of the collected information.

Studies across the United States have shown that young adults that listen to classical music have a better memory. Of those that obtained brain damage previous to the study, music repaired most, if not all, of the damage. Therefore, using music as therapy is an effective way to help heal parts of the brain. Music therapy is an effective alternative therapy option that specialized therapists used to help someone’s emotional, mental, spiritual, and physical health. For people who do not need music therapy, and listen to classical music, their brain can retain information better. For example, classical music affects how well someone can memorize spelling, poetry, and foreign words. Also, people who play an instrument or listen to classical music can learn and understand a foreign language more easily than someone who does

Caroline Palmer, professor at Ohio State University and has a Music Cognition Lab and a Cognitive Psychologist. She has her PhD and researches about people remembering long sequences of speech and music and how they make these sequences. The target audience for this article is psychologist, researchers and psychology students. The article mentions a lot of psychological studies and cognitive terms. It explains the terms in very simple forms, but the concept might be harder for a regular everyday person to understand.

Otsuka, Yanagi and Watanabe (2008) trained 6 experimentally naive male Wistar rats to discriminate music from Bach and Stravinsky. The rats were approximately 12 weeks of age at the start of the experiment. The rats were trained on a concurrent-chain schedule that allowed the experimenters to observe any preferences towards four different styles of music: Bach, Stravinsky, white noise, and conspecific vocalization. The experimenters used white noise as a control in the study. The results showed that the rats did not have a strong preference to either Bach or Stravinsky. However, the rats disliked the conspecific vocalization compared to the white noise. The rats were able to discriminate between the four styles of music, but the

My results show that listening to classical music is most affective when studying. When the tests were being completed, I noticed that with the classical music and no music, the subject seemed to already know the answer instead of having to work it out. With the heavy metal and background noise, the subject found it harder to think and work the answer out.