English Music Lyrics Download
Lester Chiaramonte
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Background: Early sexual activity is a significant problem in the United States. A recent survey suggested that most sexually experienced teens wish they had waited longer to have intercourse; other data indicate that unplanned pregnancy and sexually transmitted diseases are more common among those who begin sexual activity earlier. Popular music may contribute to early sex. Music is an integral part of teens' lives. The average youth listens to music 1.5 to 2.5 hours per day. Sexual themes are common in much of this music and range from romantic and playful to degrading and hostile. Although a previous longitudinal study has linked music video consumption and sexual risk behavior, no previous study has tested longitudinal associations between the content of music lyrics and subsequent changes in sexual experience, such as intercourse initiation, nor has any study explored whether exposure to different kinds of portrayals of sex has different effects.
Design and participants: We conducted a national longitudinal telephone survey of 1461 adolescents. Participants were interviewed at baseline (T1), when they were 12 to 17 years old, and again 1 and 3 years later (T2 and T3). At all of the interviews, participants reported their sexual experience and responded to measures of more than a dozen factors known to be associated with adolescent sexual initiation. A total of 1242 participants reported on their sexual behavior at all 3 time points; a subsample of 938 were identified as virgins before music exposure for certain analyses. Participants also indicated how frequently they listened to each of more than a dozen musical artists representing a variety of musical genres. Data on listening habits were combined with results of an analysis of the sexual content of each artist's songs to create measures of exposure to 2 kinds of sexual content: degrading and nondegrading.
Conclusion: Listening to music with degrading sexual lyrics is related to advances in a range of sexual activities among adolescents, whereas this does not seem to be true of other sexual lyrics. This result is consistent with sexual-script theory and suggests that cultural messages about expected sexual behavior among males and females may underlie the effect. Reducing the amount of degrading sexual content in popular music or reducing young people's exposure to music with this type of content could help delay the onset of sexual behavior.
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Variability could also be due to sampling. Studies usually use between-subject designs with overall low sample sizes (mean N = 67), which afford less power to detect effects (de la Mora Velasco & Hirumi, 2020; Kämpfe et al., 2011). To more firmly establish the polarity and size of the effects of background music, we employed a within-subjects design with a relatively large sample.
Few studies considered the subjective impact of music; but the general finding is that people have poor metacognition on this subject. Hallam and Godwin (2015) assessed the impact of calming vs. exciting music (as opposed to silence) on the quality of story-writing in children. Exciting music was detrimental to performance, yet this type of music was perceived as more enjoyable and hence as beneficial. Anderson and Fuller (2010) assessed reading comprehension in 7th and 8th graders in a musical and silence condition. Performance was lower in the musical condition, and this effect was larger for students that reported a preference for listening to music while studying. Christopher and Shelton (2017) asked participants to judge their performance in musical and silence conditions while performing reading and arithmetic tasks. Background music hindered performance in both tasks, but participants were unaware of its detrimental effect.
We formulated the following hypotheses. First, given that music with lyrics contains speech information, we expected this condition to create the largest interference in tasks that involve verbal processing. This prediction is based on the Irrelevant Speech Effect, namely the impairment of performance observed when irrelevant background speech is presented concurrently with a memory task (Colle & Welsh, 1976; LeCompte et al., 1997; Salamé & Baddeley, 1982, 2013). Our second prediction was that instrumental music would be less disruptive than music with lyrics. In the memory literature, background sounds were also found to disrupt performance (Jones & Macken, 1993). This prediction is however not without controversy. Instrumental music could also be predicted to produce better performance due to changes in emotional states, e.g., by relaxing participants (Kiss & Linnell, 2022).
Note: Each task was completed three times, once in silence, once while listening to instrumental music (lo-fi) and once with music with lyrics. Background music was presented during the study phase only.
In each block of the visual recall task, a sequence of 20 colored images were displayed on the center of the screen one-by-one. As shown in Figure 1B, before each image, a fixation cross appeared on the middle of the screen for 1 s, followed by a blank screen for 0.5 s. Afterwards, the colored image was presented for 3 s. After all images were displayed, the participant was asked to make a judgment of learning, similarly to the verbal recall task. Then the recall phase began, in which all 20 images were probed in random order. Each image was presented first in gray color surrounded by a gray wheel. When the participant hovered the cursor over the grey wheel, the color of the image changed continuously. This is because the grey wheel was covering a continuous color wheel. By moving the mouse around the grey wheel, the participant continuously adjusted the color of the probed image. Participants were instructed to click with the mouse when they thought they had selected the correct color. There was no time-limit to respond in the recall phase. Thereafter, the next to-be-recalled image was presented. Between images, a fixation point appeared for 1 s. When they were finished recalling all images, the next block started. After the completion of all blocks in this task, participants completed the same follow-up questions regarding the manipulation of music as described for the verbal recall task.
Each block of the reading comprehension task was divided into two parts, separated by a judgement of learning. Each part consisted of the presentation of a sequence of 20 sentences (i.e., one of the lists generated for this task). As illustrated in Figure 2A, each sentence was preceded by a fixation point (1.5 s), followed by a blank screen (0.3 s). Afterwards, a sentence appeared on the center of the screen for 2 s. A blank screen appeared once more for 0.3 s before the five options were displayed for 4 s. The five options were randomly contained inside rectangles, all centered and positioned vertically in the center of the screen. Participants had to click on the option they thought completed the sentence correctly. If they did not respond within 4 s, a time-out was registered and the program moved to the next event. Time-outs were counted as incorrect answers. After the first 20 sentences, participants were asked to make a judgment of learning by predicting how many sentences they would complete correctly in the next half of the block. They answered by moving a slider ranging from 0 to 20. Then, the next 20 sentences were presented. It followed the same structure as the first one. In blocks in which background music was played, the music was continuously looping while participants completed both block parts and the judgment of learning rating. For each participant, the six sentence-lists created for this task were randomly distributed across the silence, instrumental and lyrical blocks, and the two task parts therein. After the completion of all blocks in this task, participants completed the same follow-up questions regarding the manipulation of background music as detailed previously.
Note: Each task was completed three times, once in silence, once while listening to instrumental music (lo-fi) and once with music with lyrics. Background music was presented during completion of the task and the judment of learning rating.
Note: Instr. = instrumental music. Individual data is shown as a small overlaid cloud of dots (slightly jittered along the x-axis for better visibility). The sample mean is presented as a large dot. Error bars are the 95% within-subject confidence interval (Morey, 2008).
Note: Instr. = instrumental music. Individual data is shown as a small overlaid cloud of dots (slightly jittered along the x-axis for better visibility). The sample mean is presented as a large dot. Error bars are the 95% within-subject confidence intervals (Morey, 2008).
Our findings agree with previous studies in indicating that background music has a general distracting effect (de la Mora Velasco & Hirumi, 2020; Kämpfe et al., 2011; Vasilev et al., 2018), and that the size of this distracting effect is moderated by music type. Music with lyrics contains speech, which has privileged access to our cognition. Although our study did not control that the lyrical and instrumental conditions differed only in terms of speech presence, a recent study showed that speech was the determinant variable in generating a distraction effect in a continuous reading task (Vasilev et al., 2022). Our results corroborate this assumption. This speech-related effect may be due to either semantic or phonological interference with the ongoing task (Vasilev et al., 2022).
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