For years many anti-rock music books and booklets have quoted scientific research to demonstrate rock music endangers the health of those who listen to it. In an extract from his new book The Contemporary Christian Music Debate', American author Steve Miller shows that such so-called scientific research is wrong.

Third, Diamond's conclusions are contradicted by many other psychological studies. Since a biased researcher could uncover scientific studies from somewhere to support most any opinion, a more thorough study of the extant literature is in order. I studied all of the relevant psychological literature I could find that was published from the early 1960s to the present. This study yielded many insights on the psychological effects of musical styles. (Note: Although I am using Dr Diamond's assertions as a starting point, the following study will apply equally to other assertions that popular music styles cause psychological harm.)

MUSIC AND TASK PERFORMANCE
Dr Diamond concludes that rock music causes a loss of energy and posits that work inefficiency will result (for example, decreased output and more errors). Yet other studies have yielded the opposite result. A 1979 North Carolina State study began by noting the established fact that, in practical tasks such as long-term driving, monitoring radarscopes, and industrial inspection, people's vigilance (alertness, watchfulness, attentiveness) decreases over a period of time, resulting in an increase in the probability of errors. The object of the NC State study was to ascertain what effect music might have on the maintenance of vigilance.

A summary of the test was stated as follows: the subjects "performed a vigilance task under familiar rock, familiar easy listening, unfamiliar rock, unfamiliar easy listening, and no music conditions." The result? "Familiar music significantly increased heart rate and percent detections and also helped subjects maintain vigilance over a period of time, thus decreasing the probability of errors. Type of music had no significant effect."

The results of this test contradict Diamond's hypothesis. Familiar music, regardless of style, actually heightened awareness and thus improved performance.

A 1988 University of Kentucky experiment also contradicted Diamond's assertion. 96 subjects were assigned to one of four experimental groups in an effort to test the effect of background music on their ability to perform 220 eye/hand co-ordination problems. The four groups were: task only, task and classical background music, task and jazz background music and task and popular background music. The popular piece was "We Don't Need Another Hero", the Tina Turner theme song from the movie Mad Max Beyond Thunderdome.

The four conditions made no significant difference in the number of problems completed (that is, the ability to perform the task). Yet, it is interesting to note that 35 students reported that they felt the music interfered with their performance. Eight felt distracted by the popular piece, 12 by the classical and 14 by the jazz.

I am not concluding that classical music is therefore more distracting than rock; other factors such as preferences and familiarity would need to be controlled to test such a hypothesis. The primary conclusion of this study was that "the experimental condition had no significant effect on task performance."

A 1989 University of Illinois study found subjects generally performing better on tests when familiar, popular music was played in the background rather than less-familiar classical music. Still, critics of the rock beat claim that a 1987 study with mice presents contrary evidence to the aforementioned university studies. According to these critics, "constant exposure to a heavy rock beat caused mice to lose learning and memory capabilities", and actually altered the brain tissue of the mice. However, an examination of the study reveals that the mice were never exposed to a rock beat. The experiment was not designed to compare the effects of different rhythms. Rather, they compared the effects of classical rhythms with the effects of nonrhythmic beats (chaotic drumbeats that were out of synch with any dominant beat). Rock music was neither used nor even mentioned in the study.

The error apparently originated when Insight magazine incorrectly reported that the experiment compared the effects of "different musical rhythms." (Since rhythms is by definition a regular pattern, the chaotic beats of this experiment should neither be designated as rhythms nor be equated with rock beats, which are actual rhythms.) The magazine then linked the detrimental sounds with the rock beat.

Finally, the critics quoted the magazine apparently without reading the original study and assumed that the experimenters used a rock beat. They used nothing of the sort. The resulting confusion has been unfortunate.
A study published in the Indian Journal Of Applied Psychology did compare the effects of rock and classical music on albino rats. It was found in this study that both styles of music aided the learning process in the early stages and hindered it in the latter stages. Further, both styles helped the rats to maintain their learned response after they had been exposed to stress.

But the studies using human subjects are much more important in this regard, not only because of our psychological distance from rats but also because of our ability to account for such variables as familiarity and preference.

What we can conclude from this section is that rock music has not been shown, in and of itself, to inhibit performance. In fact, if the rock songs are familiar to the subjects, they may very well enhance performance in certain circumstances.

MUSIC AND STRESS REDUCTION
Recent studies on music and stress reduction also impact our present discussion, particularly since some claim that rock irritates the listener and produces stress.

In a 1984 Pennsylvania State study, subjects were asked to rate their level of relaxation after listening to 15 minutes of one of five types of music. The researchers observed that "No single type of music was found to lead to significantly more relaxation...The most important factor in relaxation was the degree of liking for the music."