Examining Correlation Between the Genre of Music Present & Increased Academic Performance Through Beta Wave Measurement

Abstract

In a world saturated with media at every turn – especially music, and many different genres of music for everyone to enjoy, the critical question is often asked: does music positively impact the work produced whilst listening to it? This experiment seeks to answer that question using a 3D printed EEG to measure beta waves in the brain, thus providing more concrete results. It was hypothesized that listening to a genre of music such as classical would boost performance on a math exam. This experiment explores the correlation between the presence of music whilst taking a math exam and the score on said exam. In the experiment, each participant was first given a math exam to complete with no music whilst undergoing an EEG examination to establish a baseline, then were given a different form of the exam to complete whilst listening to a specific genre of music that was randomly assigned prior. Afterwards, we determined that slight improvement was observed with an average increase in score of 0.45 points, however with an r-squared value of only 0.091. The EEG analysis did provide an r-squared value of 0.370 when experimental error was removed, giving a moderately strong relationship that music does not have an impact on beta wave amplitude. We concluded that although music increased math scores slightly, it was not statistically significant using an alpha level of 0.05. However, since almost 20% of the trials had error resulting in unreliable data, further refinement/re-testing of the methodology must be conducted.