Re: Does music affect short term memory?

Dear Casey,

I am going to assume that you want help finding information as opposed to a direct answer to your research question. There are a number of places to find research material for your subject. I would suggest that you first do a search on Medline. Use “music and short-term memory” as your keywords. As a starting point, I found the following articles here:

Steele, K.M. (1997), Listening to Mozart does not enhance backwards digit span performance, Perceptual and Motor Skills, 84, 1179- 1184; Rauscher, F.H. (1995)

Listening to Mozart enhances spatial-temporal reasoning: towards a neurophysiological basis, Neuroscience Letters, 185, 44-47.

As you can see, you are likely to find articles with some conflicting results.

Another source of information is Psychological Abstracts. If you use this, I would suggest that you find a copy of the Thesaurus of Psychological Index Terms in order to come up with your keywords. Both of these are published by the American Psychological Association and they should be available in the library of most colleges or universities. You can also do an Internet search on Altavista (or similar search engine). In this case, I would use the keywords of psychology and music.

Here is a list of web sites that might provide additional information:

Music Perception

P sychology of Music

The Auditory Homepage

The Society of Amateur Scientists

Good luck in your scientific journey!