Little Scientists: Savi Joshi, Tiara Bhatacharya, and Delaney Martin
Music is an important influence in many teenagers’ social, academic, and physical lives. For some, it encourages focus on tasks such as homework or extracurricular, such as athletics; for others, it is a reliable source of comfort and a break from the stress caused by school. However, some songs prove to be better at helping students focus and promoting intellectual capabilities. For instance, it is a common perception that classical music helps infants make good bases for learning in the future. Although many believe this, we were curious to see if music actually affected the brain and heart.
In this experiment, Delaney, Tiara, and Savi tested how would the heart react to the different styles and tempos of music. We used 5 songs: New World Symphony (Dvorak), Always (Panic! At The Disco), Levels ID Original Mix (Avicii), Louder: Doctor P & Flux Pavilion Remix (DJ Fresh), Let's Go ft. Yelawolf, Busta Rhymes, Twista, and Lil Jon (Travis Barker). We were looking for a change of heart rate or a spike in the heart beats. If a person were to listen to high tempo music such as Let's Go or Louder, their heart rate would be higher than while listening to New World Symphony or Always.
We used logger pro to record the heart rate and the heart beat. We tested our experiment on Delaney, Savi, and Tiara.
Tiara in her natural state while listening to classical music.
Savi intensely listening to music while Delaney uses the assistance of Logger Pro and the EKG to record data.
We found our that our initial hypothesis was correct, but with exceptions. The music did not affect Savi at all. We think this is caused by her familiarity with these songs, meaning she would be used to the tempo of the music. Whereas Tiara only identified with the classical music, calming her down significantly. Delaney was affected by the music the "best" and responded to almost every song.
The top graph represents all three of the runs overlapping. The next represents Savi's response to the music. As noticed, all though her heart rate is high, due to some error, it maintains to stay the same along with her heart beat. The blue represents the 2nd run with Tiara as the test subject. Whereas, Tiara also with a more stable heart rate with slight fluctuation became excited when New World Symphony came on. When the music started, her heart beat would spike but eventually calm. As seen, during the 30 second intervals of silence her heartbeat was stable. Last, the green represents Delaney. Her heart rate fluctuated all over during the course of the experiment, but her heartbeat was only affected when she was introduced to Let's Go in the beginning and Louder towards the end.
To conclude, the effect music has on a subject depends on the subject's preferences and their familiarity with the music. Throughout all three runs, one fact remains the same: classical music caused stability in heart rate and a calm heartbeat.
