Background Music Effect

Music has been part of human civilization for thousands of years. It can be found in every known culture and elsewhere on earth. It is often defined that music is the universal language, given that all human being seems to like some kind of music. Many people listen to music for entertainment and relaxation, but some researches, with regards to music, have concluded that music can affect one’s cognitive ability and can provide our brains with environment which is favorable to many different things. This only explains that music can affect human in many different aspects. It can have both a positive, as well as negative effect on the human brain and cognitive ability.

In 2004, researchers conducted a study that presented the effect of Mozart’s

Friedman, 1959). Greenberg and Fisher (1971) conducted a study in which they played some background music to people who were studying, and it was discovered that those subjects who heard loud, hard rock type music did not attempt the test very well. With this in mind, it seems to be an essential area to study how the background music can affect student’s performance as there is an increasing trend to have a specific type of sound or music playing in the background while concentrating on other important tasks (Azzam, 2006; Ballard, 2003; Elias, 2005).

The definition of background music can vary with each individual however, the general definition stands as: music that is played when someone is primarily focusing their attention on another activity or task instead of focusing on listening to the music (Radocy & Boyle, 1988). Additionally music can affect a variety of things such as motor performance, effect on mood, thinking, attitude and learning tasks (Miles,

The right hemisphere is activated mostly by music, and the left hemisphere is activated mostly by math. All types of learning are dependent on the mood and state of the student or learner (Jensen, 2000). Potential for learning and performing math-related tasks improves as the connections between the brain cells that are activated via stimulation of music strengthens. In conclusion, anything can speed up the process of learning a certain task and can most certainly have the potential to improve its scores while performing that task (Jensen, 2001). There are various variables to be considered in this area of research, ranging from the music genre up to the type of background music that each student has. However, only few researches have been done relating music, specifically rock music, and math test performance levels. For that reason, the researchers plan to test the effect of listening to rock music while completing a math test, specifically with grade 5 students.

Based on the previously discussed researches, it is hypothesized groups with rock as background music while completing the math test would score lower compared to those groups without any background music with them. With that, this research would try to determine on how rock music can interfere the mathematical problem solving ability of grade 5 students.