Essay Listen Up ! The Experience Of Music In Sports

In a 2008 article of Athletic Insight titled “Listen Up! The Experience of Music in Sport – A Phenomenological Investigation.” Lacey Sorenson et. al were attempting to consider the role of music in sport. They did so by taking a phenomenological approach, which is an approach that focuses more so on the subject’s consciousness and their own direct experience, where they observed seven Division 1 athletes, of which four were male and three were female, as their main source of data. As the phenomenological approach suggests, they gathered data through the means of interviews, discussions or observations that would then be framed from the perspective of the participant. This approach was used in order to address an athlete’s true experience, and not what researchers have to say on behalf of the athlete’s

The experiment would take two teams of comparable skill level who both have comparable levels of use of music in their sport routines, preferably one that aligns with the research study where the teammates create the music compilation that consists of low tempo, relaxing music hours leading up to the game and high tempo, “pump up” music an hour immediately before the game, and make them compete in a game. The control group would continue practicing their music routine while the other inverts it, with high tempo music leading up to the game and low tempo music immediately before it. The researchers would conduct interviews with individual team members of each team before and after the game and record their experience of music in this experiment. The purpose of this experiment would be to test the experimental group’s performance and mood when they are using less desirable music for their pregame routine. My hypothesized results would be that the experimental group feels lower levels of mood and performance enhancement, further strengthening the results of the Sorenson et. al