Adrienne+S

Adrienne S. Cary Academy 2011-2012
 * DETERMINING WHY SONGS GET STUCK IN PEOPLE’S HEADS **

The purpose of the experiment was to determine why songs get stuck in a person’s head and if knowing the amount of words or lyrics that are in a song determine why. The hypothesis was that they amount of words in the song that one knows is part of the reason why the song would get stuck in the head. The experiment began with taking 2 girls and 2 boys and separately asking those people to pick one by one which CD they wanted played out of the 5. Then the next day they were asked to come back and say which song they remembered the best. After they had chosen they were to write as many lyrics as they could from the song. The results were the girls could remember much more and recite the song on paper much better than the boys who could barely remember what songs were played for them. Also it was found that they amount of words you know in a song does not determine whether or not it will get stuck in your head. The results of the other experiment were that the girls could fill in the blanks much faster than the boys of the experiment.
 * ABSTRACT **

**Experimental Improvements and Future Experiments** Some improvements would be not letting the experimenters choose the CD’s they would like to be played. This way they could guess there song and it would be more of a challenge for the tester’s to know the song and for them to be able to write the words. Also they would be asked to provide the author with their set of lyrics because this would help determine if they really knew the song and if this was the reason that they could recite the song so easily, if they had trouble reciting the song.

Future experiments could be having the people being tested have to guess the song right on the spot, after being played a pop song, since pop songs where proven to be the most popular of all of the other types; Jazz/Blues, Classical, Country. Another experiment could be, having the experiment helpers try and match a phrase with an author and a title. This would be helpful to see if boys or girls take longer to process the information from a song and then match it with its title. They would be timed in this process to make sure all of the evidence was correct and precise.

To read the full version of my paper click on the link below-

