PSYCOLOGY OF THE INSCRUTABLE

The Effects of Music Videos on Music Preference

A brief overview of a psychology experiment ran by three undergraduate students at Illinois State University

By Caitlin Buerger, Stephanie Ibe, & Jessie Bode

Abstract The purpose of this study was to discover what different factors influence music preference. We focused on visual and audio stimuli and its effects. We believed that visual-audio stimuli would have a greater affect on music preference than audio alone. Data was collected one time during the entire study from student participants. There were two groups, a control and experimental group. The two groups either received only audio stimuli or visual-audio stimuli. The results show that visual stimuli actually had a negative effect on music preference.

Keywords Music preference, visual stimuli, music videos

Music has become an important part of American culture. It comforts and relaxes people, affects our emotions and we use it to express who we are. Each individual has his or her own preference of music. According to North (2010) personality is related to music taste and the reason individuals listen to music. However, there are other factors that could possibly explain differences in music preference. For example, could the way music is presented to an audience affect the way music is interpreted? In a study by Jesse and Massaro (2010), it was found that when participants were given a visual of the singer paired with the lyrics they were able to comprehend the song better than having the lyrics alone. The purpose of our current experiment was to determine if the way music is presented to viewers has an effect on music preference.

There are specific factors that influence our choices in music; we looked at visual stimuli as one of those factors. We hypothesized that viewing visual stimuli would have a positive effect on music preference. For visual stimuli music videos were used. We compared the participants feedback for the audio music to the feedback the experimental group gave the music videos they viewed. If the experimental group gave higher ratings, we would know that visual stimuli do indeed have a positive effect on music preference. Method Participants Thirty-seven subjects (18-23 years old) participated as required for course credit. The gender was a mix male and female. The participants were not assigned to any groups nor were there any recruitment procedures.

 Psychology of the Inscrutable

Auditory Visual-audio

VOLUME 1, ISSUE 1, APRIL 2011

0 -1 Par3cipant Feedback -2 -3 -4 -5 -6 -7
Figure 1 Materials and Setting The setting for the experiment was a randomly selected classroom. Pre and post questionnaires were distributed to each participant, they were asked to provide information about his or her music preferences. We used a fivepoint Likert Scale to measure likeability. We created a PowerPoint presentation with seven slides to show the participants. There were seven videos shown from Youtube.com and seven songs played from IPod speakers to the participants. Each video and music clip lasted about 30 seconds. Procedure Before we began with the music clips each group completed a pre-questionnaire asking about their music preferences. In the control group the participants listened only to the music. In the experimental group the participants viewed the music videos on a screen projector. After the participants were done listening and viewing the music/clips they were asked to complete a post-questionnaire, way we could observe if there were any changes in their music preferences.

S3muli Format
Results Our scientific hypothesis was that visual stimuli would have a greater effect on music preference compared to music audio alone. However after obtaining the data we have rejected our hypothesis. Figure 1 shows the means of the scores for each group. The audio only group [M=-5.74, SD=4.87] received higher rating than the visual-audio group [M=-3.56, SD=5.29]. The effect size was -.429, which means there was not much difference between the two groups. We had a p-value of .10, which makes our experiment not statistically significant resulting in a Type 1 error. According to a t-test for unpaired scores, the group difference was not statistically significant [t(34)=1.30, p=.10]. Based on our p value we decided to reject our scientific hypothesis and fail to reject the null hypothesis. Discussion According to the study done by Jesse and Massaro 2010, participants that were given a visual stimulus recalled more lyrics to the song as compared to those who did not receive the visual stimulus. Therefore, the effects of seeing something visually helped the musical recognition. In reality our

experiment results were not compatible to those that we originally sought for the experiment. Additional research in this area is need because few studies in this area exist. There are many important questions in this area that have yet to be answered. Such as, what specific personality factors contribute to music preference for one genre over the other, or even what effects does listening to music video the radio have on music preference? Finding out this type of information can essentially help music artist decide how they want to advertise and sell their music. For example, it might change the way music is usually released; the song airs on the radio, then is made into a music video and then lastly it is made into an audio compact disc and sold in stores and online. If this is something that creates higher sales and rating for the artist, the order of this process could potentially change with further research. References
Massaro, Dominic W., Jesse, Alexandra. (2010). Seeing a Singer Helps Comprehension of the Songs Lyrics. Psychological Bulletin & Review, 17(3), 323-328 North, A. C. (2010). Individual differences in music taste. The American Journal of Psychology, 123(2), 199-208 Schafer, T., Sedlmeier, P. (2010). What makes us like music? Determinants of music preference. Psychology of Aesthetics, Creativity, and the Arts, 4(4), 223-234 Yeoh, J. P. S., & North, A. C. (2010). The effect of musical fit on consumers memory. Psychology of Music, 38(3), 368-378