Previous Research

During my honours year at Glasgow Caledonian University I chose to research into the 'role and function of music in video games' which was supervised by Dr. Gianna Cassidy. My project was an investigation into the effects of music on player performance and experience of Tetris. I  had seven music conditions: no music, high tempo, original tempo, low tempo, high arousal, low arousal and self-selected. There were 3 hypotheses drawn: 

1. It is hypothesised that player performance and experience will be optimal when accompanied with the fast tempo version of the original Tetris track (165bpm) than the original (150bpm) and slower version (135bpm).

2. It is hypothesised that player performance and experience will be optimal when accompanied with low arousal music, as opposed to high arousal music. 

3. It is hypothesised that player performance and experience will be optimal when accompanied with self-selected music compared to experimenter-selected music (high and low arousal).

The experiment consisted of participants sitting down in front of a computer to play Tetris while listening to one of the music conditions for each play-through. 

The results:

1. Low arousal was found to be optimal in player performance over high arousal but not in experience. 

2. Self-selected music was optimal with experience over experimenter-selected music but not in performance. 

3. Lastly, fast tempo was optimal in player performance but not in experience when compared with the original music and slow tempo.

In conclusion, the results did not fully meet the expected hypotheses but the research did help to support that music has an effect on player performance and experience during a concurrent task.