Senior Honors Projects, 2020-current
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Date of Graduation
5-11-2024
Semester of Graduation
Spring
Publish
yes
Degree Name
Bachelor of Music (BM)
Department
Department of Interdisciplinary Liberal Studies
Abstract
The use of background music as a distractor can either enhance or hinder task performance depending on how various characteristics of the music influence participants’ arousal. However, existing studies on this topic lack direct manipulation of the physical characteristics of the music, instead using different musical excerpts. The lack of direct manipulation introduces confounding musical variables present in the musical stimuli. This research project examined how specific attributes of background music influence working memory by playing digitally manipulated musical stimuli while participants completed the Sternberg Digit Span task, a standard measure of working memory and processing speed. The test stimuli were classical string quartets manipulated digitally to have a tempo of 20 bpm faster than the original recording, as well as 20 bpm slower. The spectral centroid of the selections were independently raised using a high-pass filter and lowered using a low-pass filter. The study found that slower tempo resulted in marginally slower response times on the Sternberg task, but found no effect of spectral centroid filtering on response times. These results indicate that it is likely that musical tempo may influence working memory capacity and/or processing speed, which warrants further investigation using a wider range of tempo across a variety of working memory tasks.
