1. Introduction

This study's research question is the difference between the high-speed music and the low-speed music in alleviating negative feelings, systematically exploring the music speed relationship with people's emotions.

In our daily life, different tempos of music can trigger entirely different feelings. Smith and Lee confirmed that music therapy can significantly enhance personal emotional recovery, happiness, and employability, which means that music can improve people's feelings in real life [1]. Moreover, Yang et al. show that music does have an impact on human brain activity, and when brain activity is affected, people's emotions or feelings also change [2]. The resource also mentions that different musical rhythms may evoke different cognitive and emotional reactions. For example, high-speed music may be more likely to induce positive emotions (such as excitement and happiness), while low-speed music may tend to induce lower excitement (such as comfort and peace).

Therefore, this study sets the music speed as the only influencing factor to observe specific emotional reactions and reveal the differences in the degree of relieving emotions, and aims to clarify the following core issues: What is the impact of high-speed music and low-speed music on people's feelings respectively? Will different music speeds make people have different emotional reactions?

2. Method

In the experiment of Yang et al., the participants' emotional state was first recorded through physiological indicators [2]. Then, the participants were assigned to listen to a piece of high-speed or low-speed music. After the music, the experimenter measured their physiological indicators again to observe the changes of their emotions. Our study is similar to the above experimental structure - measuring current feelings, listening to the music, and then measuring feelings again - but using the Perceived Stress Scale to measure, not physiological indicators [3].

In addition, the music selection criteria of this experiment also corresponded to the resource. Yang et al. ensured that the music has a clear and uninterrupted rhythm, constant frequency, fewer harmony or melody changes, and a relatively low level of familiarity with the audience [2]. Therefore, we controlled the choice of musicians and chose the same musician, “Mozart” of the same type but different music as an experimental stimulus and excluded interfering factors such as the musician’s style, music type and other unrelated factors to affect the experimental results.

Our study is manipulated through questionnaires. The total number of participants was 50, with 25 participants listening to the low-speed music and 25 participants listening to the high-speed music. In order to reduce interference factors, the experiment was conducted face-to-face with an experimenter and a participant. The experimental process began with letting the participants complete the first half of the questionnaire by using questionnaire stars to fill in basic information, including age, gender and nationality and questions that were similar but in different forms before and after listening to music. Then, the experimenter chose a music from Relaxing Mozart for Sleeping (00:02:20-00:03:20) [4] and Symphony No.41 'Jupiter': Molto allegro (01:28:33-01:29:33) [5], and played the music on YouTube for a minute. After listening, the participants completed the remaining part of the questionnaire. The high or low scores could directly present the feelings of the participants, which was convenient for the subsequent comparison of the differences in the level of emotional relief.

In detail, the whole questionnaire and the measurement method were based on the Perceived Stress Scale, which was the official form of Psychological Self-Assessment, and its score range from zero to four [3]. The questionnaire was roughly divided into three parts: the collection of participants’ age, gender, and nationality, the self-assessment of their current feelings and their feelings after listening to the music. The last two parts of the questionnaire were cut from the original ten questions to four questions and paraphrased into four different kinds of feelings which were relaxation, confidence, irritation, and uneasiness [3]. In the first self-assessment part, questions were declarative sentences about negative feelings, and the higher the overall scores of the four feelings, the more negative emotions. Similarly, in the last part, the scores could be calculated in the same way by changing the wording to positive declarative sentences; a higher score exhibits a higher degree of improved emotions. Comparing the scores of these two parts of the questionnaire could help understand the degree of alleviation of the negative feelings of the participants.

3. Procedure

The whole experiment had one participant to take the questionnaire, and one experimenter instructed and played the music. The samples were collected from people at the cafeteria, academic building, and dormitory. The platform used for the questionnaire was Questionnaire Star. At the beginning of the experiment, participants were told to do an experiment about the relationship between music and people’s feelings , and their information would not be leaked or used as anything else. Then the participant filled in their basic information, which was gender, age, and nationality. After that, the participant filled in the second part of the questionnaire, which was the first self-assessment table. Then, the experimenter played either the high-speed music and the low-speed music that lasted for 60 seconds. Subsequently, the experimenter instructed the person to fill in the speed of the music they listened to and finished the second self-assessment questionnaire.

4. Analysis

T-tests are used to compare the scores of each feeling before and after listening to music with the paired sample t-test, comparing the difference between high-speed and low-speed music for emotional relief with the independent sample t-test, and the one-way ANOVA is used to analyze the interaction effect of age and music.

First, we conducted a paired samples t-test. According to Table 1, rows from top to bottom represent four different feelings that are relaxation, confidence, irritation, and uneasiness [3]. By comparing the p-value in Table 2, the data shows that the feelings of uneasiness, relaxation, and irritation after and before the music both have a significant difference, since the p-values are less than 0.05. But the feeling of confidence has no significant change. So, the result is that music can effectively improve negative feelings except for confidence.

Next, our analysis used the independent samples t-test(Figure 1). We compared the data about the changes of each feeling in listening to the high-speed music and the low-speed music, respectively. According to Table 3, the outcome shows that there is a significant difference(p=0.044) in the feeling of relaxation while listening to the low-speed music. However, participants basically had the same level of alleviation the other three feelings when listening to either high-speed music or low-speed music.

At last, we used one-way ANOVA to find whether age can be a variable that affects the level of stress relief in the case of listening to different types of music. The samples were categorized into four groups to compare they were people who are under 18 listened to low-speed music, people who were above 18 listened to low-speed music, people who were under 18 listened to high-speed music and people who were above 18 listened to high-speed music. Although Fisher's test assumes all groups have similar variance and Welch's test does not require equal variance between groups, the data from Table 4 exhibit that there is no significant difference between these groups since p-values are above the 0.05 threshold, manifesting that the interaction between music and age has no statistical effect on relaxation levels.

5. Conclusion

In conclusion, by calculating and comparing participants’ questionnaire scores before and after listening to music, we found that the overall scores were higher after listening, indicating that music can effectively improve negative feelings. Secondly, when comparing the scores of participants who listened to the high-speed music with those who listened to the low-speed music, the analysis exhibits that low-speed music can make people feel more relaxed, with no significant differences in the other three feelings. Finally, after first dividing participants into two age groups based on whether they are above or below 18 years old, and then further distinguishing between the two music speeds within each age group, the data showed that the interaction between age and music speed had little effect on stress relief.

Some limitations appeared in the study. The sample size was relatively small due to the short data collection period, which affected the generalization. Environmental factors such as noise had an impact on how long participants could immerse, which was to be calculated. Plus, participants’ attitude and nervousness were not easy to control, and some were in a rush and provided with inaccurate data.

In the future, if we can conduct more in-depth research, will focus more on the impact of different Musical Instruments on emotional relief to discover the influence of other potential variables on people's emotions.

Acknowledgement

Yongshi Li, Xinyue Huang and Chengrui Zhang contributed equally to this work and should be considered co-first authors.