Science Buddies: "Ask an Expert"

[b][color=darkred][/color][size=24][/size]I have got to start on my project I am doing Does Music effect the way people sleep? Well I cant figure out how to make the Graph Numeric Help [/b]

Please provide more details of your experiment.

Do you mean music while they sleep? Does it include the time it takes to fall asleep, or time to achieve REM sleep (research this)? Do you mean how music during the day affects people's sleep that night? Can you measure alpha waves or alpha rhythm with an inexpensive device? Are you testing people or animals?

Note that some of the questions already mention things you can quantiy and graph, such as the time in seconds it takes to reach an observable event.

well im testing it on people and i think i will chart how long it takes them to fall asleep with different types of music

Hi,

That's a really interesting project! I have a friend who studies similar things in wild birds. Anyway, what you will probably want to do after you have conducted your experiment is plot the average latency to sleep on your Y-axis and have different music groups on the X-axis. Depending on how advanced you are, I might suggest using box-and-whisker plots rather than just plotting the average...but those can be very tough to make.

You probably also want to think about how you're going to control for other variables that could affect sleep latency, music or no. For example, if you do this with your parents and one of them has had a really long day at work, they're likely to fall asleep faster (depending on their personality) than they would otherwise. Thus, you're probably going to need a large sample size to be able to see any difference.

Also be aware that there are people who will be utterly unable to fall asleep if there's music playing in the background (I'm one of them!). You might want to restrict your study to a specific amount of time or exclude people like this.

Hope this helps!

Hi

Sounds like an interesting project. It also poses a lot of interesting challenges about how to design the study as well as your problem about how to graph the results.

I would like to suggest a study design called a cross-over study. Researchers often use this kind of study design to look at different effects of 2 diets or 2 excercise plans or things like that. This means you use the same group of people for both tests. You divide the group into 2 halves and half A are tested with music type 1 and the other half B, with music type 2. Then you repeat the experiment again at another time and cross over the groups so that half A get music 2 and half B get music 1. There are a couple of ways to graph the results of these - one is the box and whisker plot that Melissa described where you look at the median and range of how long it look people to fall asleep. You would put minutes to fall asleep on the Y axis and music 1 and music 2 on the X-axis. You could look at hlaf A and half B separately and then together to see if there is a difference. Also you could plot a different kind of scatter graph, with each individual a separate column on the x-axis and time to fall asleep on the y-axis but using a different color marker for the music.

Have you figured out how you will measure how long it takes people to fall asleep?

Best of luck,
Caroline

We are going to tape the people 3 kindergardeners and 3 middle school ers and see how long it takes them to sleep but we are going to use 4 types of music then see if they remember there dreams then will take and make the chart how long it takes them to sleep across what group it was in average andif we have time 3 elementry students this is soooo hard me and my partener are having trouble with getting resurch if you had any cites that would rock i thank you for all your help Oh and to control the variables and constant we will give them little to no caffine and take one night to do it with no music

Here is a website that has something to do with music and sleeping:
http://cat.inist.fr/?aModele=afficheN&cpsidt=949796

I do not understnad the role that the remembrance of dreams is going to play in your experiment. What are you going to do with that data? What is the subjects do not have any dreams?

I think the resource suggested sounds good and serves the purpose of music .Thanks for such a good resource .

Regards
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[quote="Thescienceguy"]Here is a website that has something to do with music and sleeping:
http://cat.inist.fr/?aModele=afficheN&cpsidt=949796

I do not understnad the role that the remembrance of dreams is going to play in your experiment. What are you going to do with that data? What is the subjects do not have any dreams?[/quote]
Well if they listen to Green day then maybe they wont sleep that well and have night meers or if they listen to Beoveen maybe thay thought about school Its just to see if they slept better

Hi,

Wow, that sounds like a major set of experiments that you have planned!
You might want to think about how having so many variables might make it difficult to do the analysis. I counted at least 4 variables (age, music style, dreams and time to fall asleep)
I don't know if you have studied anything to do with statistics yet but when you are doing your analysis it is important to consider if any result that you see could have just been by chance or if it has statistical significance. When you look at small numbers of test subjects in each group and lots of variables it can make it hard to tell real results from random effects. So although testign lots of things can be fun, sometimes it gives you clearer results to just test one independent variable (music style) and one dependent variable (time to fall asleep). Then maybe you can repeat the experiment and see if yuo get the same results. This would make the results more convincing and less likely to be due to chance alone. And you could still talk about all the other great ideas you had for other variables in your discussion and the kind of experiments you would do given unlimited time and resources.
Just something to think about...

Best of luck,
Caroline

Hi,

I agree with Caroline. I also think you should do some research on sleep and dreams, because remembering dreams actually suggests that someone is sleeping poorly, not well, so you might accidentally draw the wrong conclusions if you're not careful!

okk but i cant my school said we had to resurch the question cause me and my partener were gonna resurch sleep disorders and dreams but now we cant but thanks for all of your help

Hello friend,

You are always welcome for any kind of queries and information

from this community.Well anyhow I would like to thank you in this regard.


Best Regards,
Adrian

Well I need MAJOR HELP i cant find ANY RESURCH HELP

Hi,

Yes, it can be difficult finding reputable sources with information about the biology of sleep. Rather than doing google searches it can help to go to a good health information site and start searching from there. The NIH, part of the government that funds medical research has some good background research resources on sleep. See
http://health.nih.gov/result.asp/601
You need to have adobe acrobat reader to look at several of the pages.
Wikipedia also has a list of different types of sleep disorders and explanations about what they are.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sleep_disorder

Once yuo have some more specific disorders to search you could then go back to google searching to find newspaper articles and other websites about them. There has been some articles in the news lately about how short sleep duration contributes to obesity and also that kids sleeping less do worse on tests. I havent seen anything about music and sleep though.

Best of luck,
Caroline

Here is a list of scholarly articles, some dealing with the effects of music on sleep.
http://scholar.google.com/scholar?hl=en ... tnG=Search

Well i have been doing ALLOT of work so I am almost done i just have 2 more questions what should I do if they don't fall asleep in the 2 hour time limit my video camera has? I also wood like to Know if we should watch them or just let the tape run? Thanks for ALL of your help but i just need more. I will let you know what we get on the project in February

Sciencefairisgonnakillme wrote:Well I need MAJOR HELP i cant find ANY RESURCH HELP

It do happen with many and the expert

suggest some good search engines as well

as Caroline suggested.

Regards,
Adrian