The Effects of Music on Short-Term and Long-Term Memory

Recent research has suggested that there could be a benefit for learning verbal information with songs rather than spoken word; also, retrieval practices have been well documented as a beneficial learning strategy. The interaction between the two, however, has not been investigated. In this project, undergraduate students were assigned to one of four groups and listened to several complex sentences. Two groups had sentences that were spoken (Speech-Restudy, and Speech-Retrieval) and two had sentences that were sung (Song-Restudy, and Song-Retrieval). The restudy groups listened to the sentences four times, whereas the retrieval groups listened to the sentences twice, and then they were required to complete each sentence back out loud, twice as well, after being given the first part of the sentence as a cue. All participants’ memory of the sentences was tested with a cued-recall and multiple-choice test immediately after and after one week following the initial listening. Results indicated that using retrieval learning strategies can lead to significantly better recall immediately after and one week later. The scores for participants in the musical groups were slightly higher than those in the speech groups, but the difference was not statistically significant.