The effects of silence, most preferred and least preferred music on music majors' and non-music majors' performance on a memory task

Abstract: The purpose of this study was to compare the effects of various background conditions on college students' ability to memorize. The conditions used were silence, most preferred and least preferred music. Preference was determined individually by each subject. Music used in the study was from the genres of classical, easy listening, jazz, and popular. Subjects were 30 university music majors and 30 nonmusic majors who were assigned randomly to one of the three experimental conditions: 1) silence, 2) most preferred music and 3) least preferred music. During the memory testing procedure, subjects were required to memorize a list of wordpairs. A two way analysis of variance revealed no significant differences between any of the group. Mean scores for music majors were highest under the silence condition and lowest under the condition of least preferred music. Nonmusic majors had the highest mean scores under the least preferred music condition. The lowest overall mean score was for nonmusic majors in the silence condition. Comparisons between music genres revealed that with preferred music, a statistically lower mean score was obtained by subjects who listened to popular music than by those who listenend to the other three genres combined. No statistically significant differences were found between the least preferred classical and least preferred easy listening genres. It was concluded that attention be given to background music in the study environment since it may affect the ability to memorize, depending on the individual.

Keyword(s): Silence, preferred-music, music-majors, memory.

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