Effects of Music Genre and Music Tempo on False Memory Formation

This research examined students’ proportion of words correctly and falsely recognised when listening to background music whilst memorising. It was conducted to examine whether there is an interaction between music genre (classical vs rock) and musical tempo (slow vs fast). It was hypothesised that rock genre and fast tempo will have greater false recognition. 60 participants were randomly allocated to one of the four conditions. A two-way between subjects ANOVA was applied. The results show: (1) words correctly and falsely recognised did not differ between classical-genre and rock-genre music; (2) words falsely recognised were significantly higher when listening to slow-tempo than in fast-tempo music; (3) there was negative correlation between genre and tempo on both correct and false recognition. When asked to do recognition test, participants in slow-tempo condition falsely recognised more lures than in fast-tempo, but there was no genre differences in the words correctly and falsely recognised.