Lady G over Mister B?

Our experimental psychology class just recently had a mock conference for this quarter's research groups. My project was on lexical stimuli and short term memory. As fancy schmancy as that sounds, it basically came down to lists versus sentences and how well subjects were able to recall them depending on the number of words in them. I personally wanted to do an auditory memory task but my group-mates insisted on something a little less complex. Oh well.

There was a group today that particularly stuck out and I don't mean to be nit-picky but I need to critique their project (yes, online). They too had thought of an auditory memory recall study and actually presented it to the "board". Their study was to compare snippets of classical and pop music: Lady Gaga versus Beethoven. They had about 4 subjects and gave them parts of 8 different songs. The point of the study was to focus on rhythm I believe and I found it appalling, but only because of the response I got from one of the members that gave me a quick run-through about their study.

Their results showed that subjects were more likely to remember Lady Gaga over Beethoven. This is already obvious given that Beethoven and Lady Gaga come from different eras and neither sound alike. This group assured me they had a "neutral" song but I have no idea who or what would be considered the medium for these two artists. I made a point to the group that Lady Gaga had higher accuracy of recall due to the popularity of this mainstream artist and the fact that you can definitely tell a house beat from the sounds of a piano or violin. I wasn't trying to be mean, I was just commenting. I actually thought their study would be the most interesting out of the 15 that were presented today.

One of the members of the group countered my argument and told me that subjects probably were able to remember Lady Gaga more than Beethoven "because she's more soothing" and "that her beats were more flowy". Apparently the percussion section of an orchestra scares the beejezus out of the subjects, so much that they decided to eliminate any memory of that piece altogether.

At that point I felt like I just got slapped in the face with a cold fish. When did "Poker Face" ever let a few notes legato their way through a song and lull you to sleep? My God. Lady G would be the last artist I'd seek to relax. I'd be imagining future seizures and elevated blood pressure from her music. After centuries of musical influences from these masterful minds, our generation has forgotten about them and hailed sequined, fake haired pop stars as the next Mozart.

Yes taking 10 years of piano has led me to be slightly biased, but even so, that comment was just horrific.