Blog #5: I Will Never Be Satisfied

And so I have reached my very last post on my Genius Hour Project! Last week I posted about the Music and Environment section of my research and now I will conclude my project with the results from my Music as a Mnemonic Device experiment!

I wanted to test out the theory that a person who receives information through familiar tunes will retain that information better than someone who had it spoken to them. So I gathered a group of people and paired people who were around the same age (two pairs for each age group) and then met with each person individually. For each pair I had prepared a list of eleven unrelated words that I would repeat to them until they could recite it back on their own. For one person I would read the words aloud and for the other I would sing them in the tune of Pop Goes the Weasel. Then I counted how many tries it took for each person to memorize the list.

Now, I am not a scientist or psychologist, I don't have the resources or the funds to address every kind of variable that could influence the results of my experiment, but I worked with what I had and I even if my results might be a little skewed based on age, ability, environment etc., there was still a very clear advantage to hearing the words through the music because when I re-interviewed all my participants four days later and asked them to recite to me as many of the words from the list that they could remember, participants who were given the information through speech remembered an average of 57% of the words. Whereas, the participants given the information through music remembered an average of 86% of the words. 

The experiment proved that the music could possibly be a useful mnemonic device for people of different ages and abilities, which was a much more satisfying result than my Music and Environment tests because I was forced to face the fact that almost everyone will have different reactions to the music, different ideas of the kind of mood that they study best in and all I can say is that you have to try a few options out before you find what works for you! I have already made a list of my upcoming assignments for this semester using the tune of Winter Moon by Mindy Gledhill, a song that has been stuck in my head for the past couple weeks and I am already finding that I am singing it with the new lyrics in my head. They are not all there yet, but it's a start. A very promising start.

Throughout this process I have learned a lot but I still feel I uncovered more questions than I answered, which means I will just have to continue my research on my own until I am satisfied!
Until then, I'd like to thank those who followed this journey and I hope you learned something that you can take with you!