Pitch Priming Effect

Every person is different, and every person’s brain thinks in different ways, that is a fact, but what causes every person to think differently? Is it the food they eat? Is it what town they grew up in? Every element in life can cause someone to change their personality, behavior, or even their thought process, yet there may be one element that influences the humans’ thought processes the most. This element is seen throughout all stages of life: music. Music and the effects it has, if any, has been a mystery for many years now. No matter the culture, religion, or place a person comes from, music can be developed almost anywhere, and be apart of almost anyone 's life. Researchers have made numerous experiments from all over the world to try to

There was a study of pitch expectations, and fulfillment or unfulfillment of these expected pitches correlates with not just the feeling and emotions of the subjects listening to the music, but also memory. Daniel Andre Ignacio talked about this study in his piece "The Cognitive Effects of Musical Expectations on Affective Priming". This article also states that there is a correlation between reaction time, word valence (the positivity or negativity of a word), and the response to these pitches called pitch priming stimulus. Relating the two with the word valence being either positive or negative, and the pitch expectation being satisfied or unfulfilled. Daniel Andre Ignacio states “after both data sets were combined, the results supported previous research when the experimental primes that satisfied pitch expectations facilitated the speed of valence identification for positive word targets (Müller et al., 2011; Sollberger et al., 2003; Steinbeis & Koelsch, 2011)” (363). All these effects that a simple pitch frequency can have on a brain no matter the age or stage of life, music is proven to affect the brain like nothing else