GROUP TASK #4: Types of Empirical Studies
Identify whether the following studies are best regarded as reconnaissance, descriptive, measurement, correlational, or experimental. If correlational or experimental, further indicate whether it is exploratory correlational or exploratory experimental.
A researcher publishes an article describing a newly discovered box containing composition sketches written by Bartók.
While a musician takes a break, an ethnomusicologist clandestinely mistunes one of the strings on the instrument by 1/3 of a semitone. The ethnomusicologist suspects that the musician will notice the mistuning and so retune the instrument.
A researcher at Billboard magazine assembles and publishes music sales by genre for 85 countries.
A researcher analyses facial expressions in commercial videos of concert pianists. It is found that pianists tend to raise their eyebrows when the music is high in overall pitch.
A researcher commissions ten composers to create “happy” and “sad” melodies. The researcher predicts that the happy melodies will exhibit larger melodic intervals than the sad melodies.
The manager of an orchestra is interested in identifying which repertoire attracts bigger audiences. She gathers audience statistics for a number of concerts from several orchestras. She classifies each program according to whether the music is predominantly Baroque, predominantly Classical, predominantly Romantic, predominantly Modern, or predominantly Pops. She finds that the largest audiences occur for Pops concerts.
A researcher interviews twenty young mothers about singing to their newborn infants. He finds most mothers report singing to their babies, but that they are more likely to sing when no other adult is observing them. The researcher concludes that many young mothers are self-conscious about their own singing and prefer not to have an audience other than their baby.
A researcher is interested in the phenomenon of globalization and collects data from different islands in the Kingdom of Tonga. For each island, she counts the number of Internet-connected computers, and also interviews people in order to determine their favorite music. She predicts that islands where people most prefer Western pop music will be the islands that are most Internet-connected.
A school board is interested in the effect of introducing non-Western music into the middle school band program. Of eight middle schools in the district, four randomly selected middle schools include non-Western works in the band repertoire. At the end of the year, a sample of music students are interviewed from all eight schools in order collect feedback.
A music theorist carries out analyses of most of the serial works by Schoenberg, Webern and Berg. After analyzing the works, the theorist publishes a general article comparing and contrasting the serial techniques of the three composers. In particular, the theorist observes that, compared with the other composers, Webern is more likely to compose works structured as extended palindromes — with the material in the second half of the work inverted.