Students’ Musical Preference and its Relationship to Memory for Sedative and Stimulative Music

Abstract

The concept of preference for music is one that is deeply connected to memory for music inter alia. People’s preference for music varry from person to person, and this may in effect have some influence or effect on their memory for that music stimulus as they engaged with music on daily basis. With the employing and use of the quantitative method (Field’s model of 2009) in this study, the researcher used a sample size of one hundred students in a basic school to investigate the relationship between preference for music and memory for sedative and stimulative music. The statistical tools used were Inferential and descriptive (the Chi square, the Cohen’s d test, the independent and the one sample t test) were used to test the hypotheses of the significant difference between the two variables (preference and memory). The study suggests that there was a link between music preference and memory, indicating a statistically significant difference between students’ preference for the two-music stimulus. Again, there was some discrepancy in memory for music between students who prefer sedative music and those who prefer stimulative music. Finally, those who preferred sedative music demonstrated a notable advantage in memory retention when compared to their counterparts who preferred stimulative music.