Kyle+A14

MUSIC AND MATH

ABSTRACT

The purpose of the experiment was to find out if music distracted people while doing math and if it did, what music would be the least distracting to listen to. The human ear picks up sound waves and allows the sound to go through the human ear hitting the ear bud causing a chain reaction leading to the brain. In the experiment three math problems with three numbers multiplied by three numbers were were solved while listening to various genres of music and an average was taken. In conclusion no music was the least distracting while doing math problems and country music was the most distracting. This happened because without music nothing else is there for people to think about and the country song makes people distracted by having more side sounds.

EXPERIMENTAL IMPROVEMENTS AND FUTURE EXPERIMENTS In the future test subjects would do Sudoku problems to find if music distracts while doing something else that requires concentration. Test subjects could also listen to music while reading one page of a book and time could be recorded. When the test subject did the math problem/ memory game, they could have been distracted by the class talking so next time they would need to be in a room with no distractions while not listening to music. When finding the results, more people should have done the experiment for a more exact result.