In order to determine whether studying with music impacts the maintenance of written information in short-term memory, we evaluated the performance of 60 individuals which and It was a sample of opportunity. The aim of this experiment is to investigate the effect of different types of music on people’s ability to memorize words. The music was selected from three genres: pop music, metallica music, and no music. For this experiment, 60 participants were given a one word list in between subject design. They had twenty second to study each word of the list, listened to music and wrote down as many words as possible. The order in which the words were written did not affect their scores. The dependent variable was the number of words people could memorize from a word list. The independent variable was the genre of music played during memorization and recollection.Introduction Memory is considered a function of neural cells’ ability to consolidate information and make connections between neurons. According to a current popular model, memory consists of three processes: echoic memory, short-term memory (STM), and long-term memory (LTM) (Synder, 2000). There are some memories that last only a few seconds before being forgotten and there are some memories that can still be recalled after a number of years.The more durable memories that may take as much as several months to form, involve our long term memory.Short term memory is much more immediate but much less permanent. It lasts 3-5 sec on average, although this depends somewhat on the relative novelty and complexity of the material to be remembered (Synder, 2000). Short-term memory is also referred to as working memory (WM) and is composed of both processing and storage components. STM processes may exist at least for language, visual object recognition, spatial relations, nonlinguistic sounds and physical movement (Jonides and Smith, 1997:263-265). The Effects of music have often been investigated in the past. There are a lot of empirical studies that examines the impact of music on memory. The one study that is conducted by Alley tries to examine the effect of irrelevant background, vocal music and non vocal music on working memory (2008, p 277-289). These effects are determined by conducting an experiment in which working memory is examined under the conditions of silence, vocal music instrumental music and irrelevant speech. The hypothesis stated that instrumental music might be more of a help because listeners would not be forced to decipher lyrics the reason being that instrumental music does not have lyrics, while vocal music might be of a distraction because listeners would be forced to decipher what the lyrics to the song played. Participants are shown to function best under silence followed by instrumental music.. In Kazan’s article, he claims that music has a greater impact on memory. The result 3 shows that the more familiar the music is , the more memories are generated. Also researchers find out that the more pleasing a song is to a person to greater the memory recalls opposed to silence. This study is related to our research because, this study is looking at the recall memory on different musical genres rather than memory in general. The aim of our investigation is to see whether hard rock, instrumental and pop music or silence affect short term memory. The type of music used in this experiment is hard rock, pop and instrumental music in order to arrived at the result.Materials and Methods Participants Our participants are 60 volunteers between the ages of 19 to 54. All participants sign a consent form prior to participation in the study. We use the between group desingn. Every participant take only one level of experiment. Memory Task Participants have Thirty seconds to mars a list of twenty words. Subjects could stop before sixty seconds if they felt they were not able to remember any more words. This procedure includes four levels: in silence, listening to classical music, listening to a metal music and listening to a pop music. Same twenty words are used for each level. To score the memory test, each word correctly recalled counts as one point for a maximum of twenty points. Music The pop song the participants listened to during the experiment was Chandelier, by Sia. The metal song the participants listened to during the experiment was Fuel, by Metallica. The classic music the participants listened to during the experiment was Spring, by Vivaldi. All songs were accessed through YouTube. Participants listened to the first minute of the song using AKG K-44 stereo headphones. The volume through the head phones remained consistent between each participant because we kept the level at 75% of the maximum. These songs were chosen due to their word content and fast tempo. 5 Results In n=60,the datas from the memory tests are used tocompute a oneway ANOVA test using SPSS. Results with a p-value less than .05 is considered significant. Findings are as follows. To measure short-term memory retention, we score the number of words correctly recalled after the subjects are given 30 secondstostudy a list of words either in complete silence, while classical music is playing, metal music is playing and pop music is playing. The mean of words are called during the silent conditionis 6.4 (SD=0.3). The Mean of words recalled during classical music is 6.8 (SD=0.3). while the mean of words recalled during the metal music with words is 6.7 (SD=0.4). The mean of words recalled during the pop music is. DISCUSSION According to One Way ANOVA Analysis, we could not find significant value between music genre and short term memory.There were some limitations which not allow to use for significance of our research question’s results. One of them was the number of participants. If we attached to more participants, we could achieve more significant result. the other one can be added as the second independent variable. Factors such as hunger can influence significantly the results. Other limitation can be age, researchers can be use same range. İn addition, sound volume can be one of the our limitation. Overall we can say that diversity also has significant effect on the research question, meaning that those who listen to music frequently are more likely to have better result on short term memory test than those who do not listen frequently. Although we could not get significant value of our research questions as a total. we will be able to improve our research by considering.
Abstract
