Reception and Memory for Serious and Light Rock Music Videos

Abstract

An experiment was conducted to examine verbal scale ratings of rock music videos and recognition memory for clips extracted from them. In Part One of the experiment, forty-eight subjects, including equal numbers of males and females, saw forty-five second segments from eight “Serious” (meaningful subject matter) and eight “Light” (entertaining) rock music videos. They rated each video segment on nine scales measuring cognitive (interesting, challenging, memorable), affective (pleasant, exciting), contextual (personally meaningful, socially relevant), and stimulus qualities (fit of lyrics and melody, fit of video image and music). Half of each music type was viewed in a “subjective, emotional, and personal manner” and half were viewed in an “objective, analytical, and detached manner” in a within-subjects design. In Part Two, subjects were shown forty-eight three-second clips from either 1) the original forty-five second segment (“old”), 2) another part of the same video (“new”), or 3) another video altogether. Subjects had to indicate whether the clip had been seen in Part One (“old”) or not (“new”). Recognition accuracy was greater for clips from the Serious videos and for videos viewed under the Subjective Set. Generally, clips that were rated as Exciting but less Challenging were more accurately recognized. Serious videos were more accurately recognized if they were perceived as Socially Relevant and Pleasing, while Light videos were more accurately recognized if the image fit the music but the lyrics did not fit the melody.