Music on Memory:

Receiving Information Through Music Increases Recall Capabilities

Haley Gerber
The American School In Japan

Abstract
Are you able to better recall concepts and phrases when you hear them in a song, or simply
spoken word? Some may think that the recall would be the same, given that both methods
present identical information. Or perhaps they may think a voice recording would be easier to
process because there is no music to distract from the information given. I discovered, however,
that using music as an aid to remember words and more specifically ideas significantly increases
the amount you are able to recall. Throughout this year I conducted experiment that produced
results that on average, elementary school students who learned information through song were
able to recall more information than those who learned through voice recordings. I propose that
this learning gap exists is because music allows the brain to access four mediums-- written word,
spoken word, rhythm, and melody-- while voice recordings only connect two-- written word and
spoken word.

Introduction
Many studies conducted over the years suggest music can substantially increase memory-
especially in children. Psychologists are particularly interested in this idea, and from it a new
branch of psychological social sciences known as music therapy has made its way into
mainstream modern medicine
Not only is music able to help the memory of people from toddlers to seniors, it also may be used
as a therapeutic aid for those no longer able to communicate due a stroke, autism or other life
events such as an injury or disease. Music is able to rewire patients brains and make a
homologous speech center in the right hemisphere to compensate for the damage in the left- the
origin of most peoples speech.
The key idea behind music therapy is that both melody and rhythms tap into a primal idea
and connect newly learned information to concepts already hardwired into our minds.
Psychology suggests that using rhythm and melody to feed information to people enables their
brain to link several different stimuli to a single bit of information.
To understand how putting a song behind new ideas helps, one must first have a simple
understanding of how memory works.
Any and all information we intake is first stored in the short-term memory, and eventually
processed through to long-term memory if we repeat information and deem it important. To
access a memory, your brain must follow a path to where the memory is formed in our brain. The
dilemma comes when retrieving a memory may not always be so easy. Neural pathways are very
easily broken, and if only one path is formed to stored information, a broken pathway may cause
a memory to be lost.
Music on Memory

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By using rhythm and melody as mediums in addition to regular spoken word, several different
pathways are then connected to a single memory. Therefore, if one neural pathway is broken and
not able to retrieve the memory, another will.

Method
Participants
Fifty students from the American School In Japan, grades first to fourth, participated in this
experiment. All were either native Japanese or English speakers, who studied primarily in English.
None of the students had yet learned parts of speech as part of their curriculum. Participants were
randomly selected to take part in the experiment, and then randomly assigned to answer
questions based on the same information given in either a voice recording (n=26) or a song
recording (n=24).
Procedure
During first period, between 8:05 and 9:25AM, I walked children to a remote teachers lounge,
where I had set up a listening station. Participants were instructed to put on the headphones, and
were given a lyrics sheet to follow along with as they listened. After listening twice to 48 seconds
of The School House Rocks Noun Song in either spoken word or song, the lyrics sheet was taken
away and students were asked to recall the information they had just heard by answering a series
of fill-in-the-blank questions. Here are the questions participants were asked to answer:

1. A noun is a __________, __________ or __________. (3)
2. Mrs. Jones is a lady on __________ Street. (1)
3. Who did the dog bark at first? ___________________________ (2)
4. We gave her dog a ____________________. (1)
5. Do I find nouns interesting? Yes or no? __________ (1)
6. What are the two things that you can show in Mrs. Jones Story?
___________________________________________________ (2)
7. Her dog is not a thing that you can show. Yes or no? _________ (1)

For all answers, spelling was negligible, as long as sounding out the word creates the correct idea
(example: person written as prsen). If an incorrect answer was given, or the space provided was
left blank, no points were awarded. The scoring guidelines are as follows:

1. In any order, person, place, thing (3 points), missing one but writing two others (2
points), only writing one of the three (1 point)
2. Hudson (1 point)
3. The girl and brother, my brother and me, the singer and her brother (2 points),
identifying either brother or the girl but not both (1 point)
4. big fat bone, bone (1 point)
5. yes(1 point)
6. dog and/or bone (2 points), identifying either bone or dog but not both (1 point)
7. yes (1 point)
Music on Memory

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Results
As figures 1a and 1b show, cumulative point scores were given to each student according to the
points awarded for each question. After total scores were calculated, the data was then divided
into whether the participant listened to voice or song.
Figure 1a shows that who listened to the song had a mean score of 8.375 and a standard
deviation of 1.54 points, while those who listened to the voice recording had a mean of 7.04 and
a standard deviation of 2.47. These numbers show that not only does listening through a song
have better results on average, but the performance is much more consistent with a standard
deviation almost half that of voice recording listeners. While the dotplot does a wonderful job
displaying the individual scores for each category, ultimately what I was looking for is comparing
the distributions of scores, and for that, the box plot was a better gauge.
In a glance, figure 1b is able to give key points of information according to percentage of
participants who scored within a point range. The 5-point summary for song listeners is as
following: min 6, Q1 7, median 8, Q3 9.5, max 11. The 5-point summary for voice recording
listeners is as following: min 2, Q1 5, median 7, Q3 9, max 11. Seventy-five percent of the
participants who listened to the song scored seven points or above, while only fifty percent of
voice recording participants scored in the same point range. The most compelling part of
information though, is the fact that the lower twenty-five percent of scores for voice recording
listeners scored fell at least one point behind even the lowest scorer of the song listeners.


Figure 1 Number of participants in the experiment that scored cumulative points for each given number. Both a and b
show the same data, but (a) as a dotplot and (b) as a boxplot,

To test whether my results were significant, I conducted a 2-sample t-procedure to
determine how likely it was that my results might have happened completely by chance. To do
so, I first had to check whether my data would accurately portray a larger picture, and then look
at the distribution of song scores minus voice recording scores.
My only point of concern was determining normality. Though neither the sample size for
music listeners nor voice listeners were large enough to apply the central limit theorem, I looked
at the graphs of each sample. While the histogram of the music listeners looked approximately
normal, the voice listener graph looked like it may have been a bit skewed. However, the skew
was very weak, and normality was considered reasonable due to the fact that the sample size for
each was nearly 30. Also, looking at the same data on a box plot (1b), the graph no longer looks
skewed, so assuming normality was very reasonable.
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Music on Memory

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Using the t value of 2.89151 and a degree of freedom of 23, the p-value is 0.0082.
Because the p-value I found was so strong, there was very strong evidence against the null
hypothesis that there was no difference between mean scores of song listeners and voice
recording listeners.
Because I obtained a p-value of 0.0082 I had evidence to suggest that my findings were
statistically significant and that children who learn through song tend to have a higher score, and
therefor a higher ability to recall, than children who learn through just a voice recording.

General Discussion
This experiment strongly demonstrates the positive influence music can have not only in
learning, but also remembering information. However, while I do believe that this experiment
accurately portrays the benefits of music on my sample, there are a few things that, if repeated, I
would do differently.
First off, I would have the children listen to a longer clip of music. Currently, I had the
children listen to a 48 second clip of either the song or voice twice in a row, but given that the
average attention span of elementary children is 15-20 minutes, I could have used a much longer
clip of information. This, I feel, would better simulate the learning environment of school, rather
than only having to take in less than 2 minutes of information. Not only this, but having a longer
clip would allow for better questions to be asked. While some of the questions required specific
word recall, other questions simply required a yes or no and could have easily been answer
either through a guess or common sense. Because I have no way of testing the strategy children
used, my results and points awarded to the students could have been skewed.
Even though there are minor details that could have improved in the design of my study, I
believe I did everything in my power to collect unbiased results and have scores accurately
portray the recall abilities of all participants.

Conclusion
Similar to past experiments done by psychology departments in New Jersey Institute of
Technology and The College of Wooster, I found that using music as an aid to remember words
and more specifically ideas significantly increases the amount you are able to recall. By having
children listen to either a voice or music recording of the same information, Elementary students
of the American School of Japan answered a series of fill-in-the-blank, and those who listened to
the music recording scored better on average than those who listened to voice recording. While
the voice listeners had scores that ranged from 2 to 11 points out of 11, while all song listeners
scored 6 and above. After testing out my results, I found that it was extremely improbable to have
obtained the results by chance, and therefor concluded that music does, in fact, increase your
ability to recall short-term information.