Music's Effect on Memory Recall and Test Performance

Introduction and Background

Music is defined by Dictionary.com as "an art of sound in time that expresses ideas and emotions in significant forms through the elements of rhythm, melody, harmony, and color." The root of the word "music" comes from the Greek word "mousike." According to historical sources, in ancient Greece the word mousike was used to mean any of the arts or sciences governed by the Muses. During the European Middle Ages, musica was part of the mathematical quadrivium: arithmetic, geometry, astronomy, and musica. In the modern era, music is now known as a work of art rather than part of the mathematical quadrivium. Few Ph.D. holders in arithmetic, geometry, or astronomy study music as part of their work, and music has thus lost its role in the scientific and mathematical aspects of the world.

Despite moving from mathematics during the Middle Ages to art in today's era, the role music plays has remained significant. Music is used as an act of joy—people listen and dance to it at parties, enjoy it when bored, and some individuals listen to it while studying for tests. The effect music has during studying and memory recall has intrigued researchers and has become a major interest across three areas of psychology: applied psychologists trying to see connections between productivity and music, cognitive psychologists studying how music affects attention and processing, and personality psychologists interested in how individual differences in arousal affect cognitive task performance in the presence of musical distraction (Furnham & Bradley, 1997).

Psychologists have produced diverse results regarding the effects of music on task performance. Campabello and colleagues (Decarlo, O'Neil, & Vacek) found in their study that music does have an impact on learning. They discovered that preschool children with early exposure to music showed an IQ increase of 10 to 20 points over children without music exposure. In the same study, students at age 15 with musical experience had higher reading and mathematics scores than children without musical experiences. Others argue that melodic complexity determines recall performance (Silverman, 2012). In another study, research showed that music has no benefits on visual memory but does improve verbal memory (Rickard, Vasquez, Murphy, Gill, & Toukhsati, 2010). Rong-Hwa Huang and Yi-Nuo Shih (2011) argue that background music does influence listener attention. In their study, they claimed that "likelihood of background music affecting test-taker attention performance is likely to increase with the degree to which the test-taker likes or dislikes the music." Hogan David and Thomas Huesman also argue that music affects memory recall, concluding that music education and language experience may have similar influences on the development of verbal memory.

Literature Review and Hypotheses

Beyond studying task performance and memory recall, researchers have examined whether personality contributes to the effects of music on cognitive performance (Furnham & Bradley, 1997; Dobbs, Furnham, & McClelland, 2011). Furnham and Bradley discovered that "there was a detrimental effect on immediate recall on the memory test for both groups, introverts and extraverts, when music was played." Dobbs Stacey and colleagues (Furnham Adrian and McClelland Alastair) supported this prediction by discovering that introverts performed less than extroverts in both the presence of music and without music.

The present study aims to investigate whether music would have a distraction or non-distraction effect on students studying and their learning. A reading comprehension task has been chosen, as Doyle and Furnham (2012) found that creative individuals tend to listen to more music while studying and reported lower distraction levels. Additionally, Douglas Olsen (1995) discovered that memory recall did not differentiate between background music or no background music, disagreeing with the concept that music affects the development of verbal memory. It is anticipated that there will not be a significant difference in the two groups where a similar task is performed. Secondly, in accordance with Huang and Shih (2011), Group B individuals are expected to have a higher test average than Group A.

Students (N=24; 10 males and 14 females) were recruited from three colleges, with 12 allocated to the experimental group and 12 allocated to the control group. The mean age of participants was 22.4 years (SD=7.01 years). Participants were recruited through the offer of free Starbucks coffee.

Music was produced from Windows Media Player. The particular combination of music was created on a Sony Vaio laptop using Windows Live Movie Maker. The samples included tracks with high tempo and instrumental layering. The length of the finished piece was 8 minutes and 3 seconds.

Method

The tests consisted of 60 items arranged in three sets, including multiple-choice questions, true/false items, and an essay portion. The tests were untimed in both the pretrial and post-trial administrations.

All 24 participants completed two memory recall tests. In the pretrial, each participant read page 115 from a biology textbook without background music and completed a memory recall test 24 hours later. After the test, participants were divided into two groups of 12. Each participant in both groups was given page 115 from a cognitive psychology textbook to read, and another memory recall test, designated as the post-trial, was administered 24 hours later. Group A read without background music, while Group B read with a background music combination of hip-hop, reggae, and classical selections.

A two-factor paired-sample t-test was carried out in SPSS 21, with Group A and Group B pretrial scores as variable 1 and Group A and Group B post-trial scores as variable 2. Four measures of paired-sample differences were used to obtain the significance value for the two groups. The mean was used to determine the average of the pre-trial test and the average post-trial test scores. The mean between the measures varied from µ=−0.58 (Group A) to µ=1.16 (Group B).

Results

Table 1 shows the mean score and standard deviation of scores for all participants in the music and non-music test conditions (N=24, 12 Group A and 12 Group B). The average test score from Group A pretrial (µ=13.6) is less than the average test score of the post-trial (µ=14.3). The average test score from Group B pretrial (µ=14.5) is greater than the average test score of the post-trial (µ=13.3).

As shown in Table 2, there was a main effect for test condition (t(11)=−0.939, p>0.05) in Group A. This indicates that there was no significant difference in test scores between the pre-trial without music and the post-trial without music, despite lower mean scores in both variables (µ=−0.58). The experimental group, Group B, provided the same conclusion as Group A. The test condition (t(11)=1.304, p>0.05) indicates that there was no significant difference in test scores between the pre- and post-trial, despite having greater mean scores between the two variables (µ=1.16). Since the p value is greater than 0.05, this study retains the null hypothesis that music does not have any effect on memory recall and thus no effect on test performance.

The present study aimed to investigate whether music plays little to zero role in memory recall and test performance. As expected, there was no significant difference in performance between the two groups. The research findings are in line with predictions made based on the findings of Silverman (2012), who found that there was no significant difference between memory recall of music majors and non-music majors, despite the fact that music majors tended to outperform non-music majors.