Madeleine and Yara's IRP idea and research
Madeleine Beimford
We will select a group of participants, and split them into 3 separate groups. The groups will be assigned to listen to either Kim by Eminem, Sonata in C by mozart, or have no music at all. Each person will listen to 30 seconds of their song and then be handed a sheet of simple math equations to complete. We hypothesize that the group listening to the Mozart Sonata will preform the best on the questions, and at the highest speed.
E. Glenn
Schellenberg
Subjects heard a fast-tempo Mozart
piece in a minor key, or a slow-tempo Albinoni piece in a minor key. Subjects
who had heard the Mozart piece were in a happy positive mood after listening,
and performed better on general cognitive tasks. This relates to our study in
that it utilizes two forms of music to test its effects on cognitive abilities.
The two types of music have different paces as well, relevant to our use of
classical even tempo music and fast heavy rap.
Charles Emery
Studied the effect music has on people during physical activity. Participants who exercised with music performed twice as well on the verbal fluency test than they did afterwards with no music. Chose Vivaldi’s ‘The Four Seasons’ and later concluded that classical music did have a greater impact on mathematical and spatial skills than any other music genre. This relates to our study in that classical music stimulates different parts of the brain and still enhances their mathematical and spatial/temporal reasoning over other musical genres.
Rauscher, Shaw,
Ky et al
Examined different music’s effect
on cognitive ability. Thirty six college students were divided into three
groups which spent ten minutes in one of the three conditions: listening to a
piano sonata by Mozart, (2) listening to relaxation tapes, or (3) silence. They
were then tested on their spatial/temporal reasoning. After a number of tests,
the results identified the Mozart’s sonata group as the highest scorers out of
all three conditions. The effects of these heightened spatial/temporal are very
brief however, decreasing after fifteen-twenty minutes. This relates to our
study in that it displays mozart’s potency to heighten people’s math skills
over music like rap.
Alexander Golob
when by having babies listen to certain music, it makes them smarter.
Although this isn't exactly the same thing, I think it is really cool
to see how music effects cognitive function. Anyways, I think you've
got some really strong research, but I'm little confused on your
hypothesis. You say that you hypothesize Mozart music will yield the
best results, but you don't mention Eminem and 'no music' in the
hypothesis at all. Do you think that Eminem's music will be better or
worse than people who don't listen to music?
Also, when it comes to testing, how will you make sure that it is not
people who are mostly good at math listening to Mozart and people that
are average at math listening to Eminem?
My suggestion would be to only target a population of students in a
specific level math class from a specific grade level (because juniors
in senior classes or sophomores in junior classes etc might be more
gifted in math than their peers). Hopefully, this would reduce
variation in the skill level of the participants.
Another thing you need to be careful of is to tailor the math problems
to the population you are testing. For example, finding the
derivative of an equation might not be the best idea for freshmen.
I look forward to seeing the results of your study!
Have a great Thanksgiving!
mike vivo
while listening to music with lyrics. My suggestion is using a song
with out lyrics to test music's effect on the subject's completion
rate. It would not necessarily have to replace Kim by Eminem. Adding
an instrumental of sort to compare to Mozart could increase the test's
reliability.