Hello. My name is Alexis Heikkinen. My question is do different kinds of music affect peoples moods? I got my question because I was sitting in my room and I switched a tape of Mozart to a tape of rock and it changed my mood quite a lot . So I came up with that question. And since it affected my mood, my hypothesis was it would affect other people's moods.
To get started, I got four kinds of music. I originally wanted five kinds of music: rap, rock, blues, opera, and a song called Dance of the Firebird. But I couldn't get the "Firebird" song on tape. When I finally got the last tape, I had to figure out what to do with them. I thought about it for a loooooooooooooooong time. Finally I decided to play the tapes to individuals and have them answer question sheets about how they felt. Basically, I wanted them to draw with colors and show how they felt with their drawings.
I tested 14 people. While playing rap music, most people said they felt cool, weird, or free. The colors they used were mainly purple, green, orange, blue, or red. The actual pictures that the people drew were mainly rap singers, musical notes, or sound waves. On rock music, most people said they felt cool, heavy, weird, or funny. The colors they used were mainly orange, purple, brown, blue, pink, and green. The actual pictures that they drew were people with really crazy hair, sunglasses, guitars, musical notes, and sound waves.
On blues music, people said they felt sad, light and airy, or sleepy. The colors they used were blue, red, green, yellow, and pink. The actual things they drew were: fields, restaurants, and bands.
On opera, people said they felt happy sleepy, and light airy. The colors they used were: red, orange, yellow, green, blue, purple, pink, and brown. The actual things they drew were: flowers, sound waves, funerals, and women in Viking hats.
What I've found out from my data was that people's moods do get affected by music. I have seen many mood swings during my testing, especially going from opera to rock. I have also found that most people my age (9 to 11) don't like opera and get bored every time they hear it. Most people my age also surprisingly don't like blues. Everybody liked rap, but rock was a little less popular.
I think that if I were to do the whole project again I would do lots of things differently. First, I would not run two subjects at once especially when their doing two different things. Second, I would start working on the article earlier. Third, I would get all my materials before I started testing. Fourth, I would not lose my data at the end of the project and I'd do some statistics with my results.
I would like to thank my Mom for helping me find all the materials I needed, my teacher for helping me along the way, and also everybody who was tested for being tested so I could actually get data.