The effect of background music on second-grade children's rhythmic and tonal pattern recognition

Thesis (D.M.A.)--Boston UniversityThe purpose of this study was to examine the effects of background music on second-grade students' rhythmic and tonal pattern recognition. As no locatable research has examined the effects of passive listening on the tonal and rhythmic pattern recognition skills of second-grade students, this investigation sought to answer the following research questions: 1) What is the extent ofthe relationship between exposure to repetitive background music and music pattern recognition scores among second-grade children; and 2) What is the extent ofthe relationship between musical preference and music pattern recognition scores among second-grade children? This study was conducted over a period of fourteen weeks. Sixty second-grade students comprised the sample used in this investigation. The participants were randomly assigned to one of two groups: the treatment group, which heard a continuous collection of classical background music every day for a total of sixty minutes per day, five days per week, and the control group, which received no treatment. The standardized test employed in this study was Edwin Gordon's Primary Measures ofMusic Audiation (PMMA), intended for children from kindergarten to grade 3. Additionally, a survey addressing the issue of preference was distributed at the end of the fourteen weeks to the students in the treatment group. All participants were administered the PMMA at the end ofthe fourteen-week testing period. The data gathered in this investigation were analyzed via a two-way Repeated Measures ANOVA. Analysis ofthe PMMA scores revealed statistically significant differences between the control group and the treatment group in the subset of participants with low-to-average music aptitude on the rhythm test. Statistically significant differences were also found between the composite percentile, rhythm raw and rhythm percentile scores of those participants in the treatment group who liked the music versus those who disliked the music. The significant results of this study include: a) those participants who possessed low-to-average music aptitude benefited from the background music program in the area ofrhythmic discriminatory skills; and b) those participants who liked the music performed better on the rhythm test of the PMMA than did those participants who disliked the music