1. Generation Differences in Meaningfulness of Song Clips and Abstract Auditory Stimuli
Anh N Le, Khadejia Norman, Clayton Reichart, Aaron O’Brien, Kayla Causer, Anne T Gilman, PhD
Juniata College
Introduction
Results
Discussion
We did not find a strong associational advantage for meaningful sounds compared to abstract sounds.  
 Acoustically-poor ringtones such as computer start-up and television shows prompted more associations than popular songs across age groups. 
For participants in the over-37 group, abstract chirps and millennial pop songs prompted a similar amount of associations.  Acoustically-poor ringtones such as computer start-up and television shows prompted more associations than popular songs across age groups.
We did confirm the importance of songs from early adulthood, similar to Krumhansl & Zupnick (2013).
The post-2000s songs showed the largest generation gap in associations
Eighties songs showed the smallest difference.  (See Chart 1.)
Participants made more complaints about the chirps than about other categories. Counts of participant comments using “annoying” or “not again” are shown in Chart 2. This difference is all the more salient in light of our including only eight chirps.
Going forward, we plan to:
Analyze associations for more specific versus more abstract language and compare that across sound stimulus categories.
Rely on song stimuli that are less likely to vary strongly across participant groups in meaningfulness.
Reduce participants’ time spent per study listening to stimuli that they find aversive or unpleasant, such as the chirps.
Evaluate whether intensity of ERP responses to these categories follows a pattern similar to that found for the number of associations.
How do perceptual characteristics interact with meaningfulness?
Gilman & Ware’s study of cross-modal associations in working memory (2009) suggested that meaningful visual stimuli trigger short-term recall advantages compared to abstract ones. To quantify image meaningfulness, Gilman, Ware, & Limber (2010) asked participants what each image used in the memory experiment brought to mind as an association. People offered more meaningful associations when presented with representational images than with abstract shapes, with a similar advantage for full-colored visual stimuli compared to grayscale ones.  
Are songs from particular phases of life more meaningful?
Generation differences must be accounted for when using popular songs as stimuli. People provide the most personal memories for songs from their teen/early adult years, followed by songs from the same phase of their parents’ lives (Krumhansl & Zupnick, 2013; Schulkind, Hennis, & Rubin, 1999)
People on average provided 1.17 associations per sound clip. Young adults provided on average 0.49 more associations than the older participants did, F(1,225)=90.42, p<.001.   
Number of associations offered differed by sound stimulus category, F(3,225)=5.50, p<.01, with the most provided for ringtones (M=1.32) and eighties song clips having the least (M=1.11).
​Participant age interacted significantly with sound category in our results (F(3,225)=3.93,p<.01). Tukey’s HSD test revealed that the differences in each category in number of associations provided by participants in the two age groups was significant except for the eighties music category.    
Method
Participants: Seventy-seven participants recruited from Juniata College students, faculty, staff, and parents.
Age 18 to 27: 41 participants
Age 37 and above: 36 participants
One almost-18-year-old student participated with assent and parental consent and was counted in the 18-to-27 group; data was excluded from one participant aged between 28 and 37. 
Materials:  Fifty-seven 500 ms clips from four categories:
Eighties: Opening chords from s Billboard hits
Millenial: Opening chords from 16 Billboard hits from
Ringtones: Initial 500ms from 16 common ringtones
Chirps: 8 frequency-modulated chirp sequences similar to Sanders & Poeppel’s (2007).
Procedure: Following Krumhansl (2010), participants listened to each 500 ms sound clip three times, identified the sound or song, then estimated its release year and recalled related associations. After responding to the sound stimuli, participants answered demographic questions.
Chart 1. Differences between age groups in each sound stimulus category except for
eighties songs were significant as measured by Tukey’s HSD test.
Chart 2. Total counts of complaints per sound stimulus category.
Figure 1. Joan Jett and The Black Heart (1980s)
Figure 3. Spectrogram of Chirp Stimulus
Figure 2. The Black Eyed Peas (2000s)
Figure 4. Spectrogram of Nokia Ringtone
References
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