Science Buddies: "Ask an Expert"

Hi, I'm starting my background research on how different types of music (classical and rock) have an effect on plant growth. The background research is due the first day of school, which is August 23rd. I'm having trouble figuring out what I should be taking notes on. The only thing I find is the same experiment that has been done by others and their reports on it. I'm not sure if that's what I should use. Could I get some help?? Thanks!

I would suggest doing research on other factors that affect plant growth. This will help you determine if any of these could be related to music--which would then help you form your hypothesis. (Think about it this way--why would you expect music to have an effect on plant growth?) However, yes, you should acknowledge other students' results in your research report.

Good luck!

Thanks a lot! I will see what I can find.

OK, so I know it's pretty late for me to be doing this but I'm worried that I haven't gotten extensive background research. I have enough sources but I'm not sure if I got all the information I'm supposed to have. So I went to the project guide page and I followed the steps, and these are the research questions I got:

How does plant growth happen?
How does plant growth work?
What causes plant growth to increase/decrease?
What is the relationship between plant growth and music?
When does music cause plant growth?
How do plants detect music?

Are these the right questions I should be asking? Also, I know that some of this information would have been in my 8th grade science textbook except I moved and now I'm pretty much halfway across the country. Should I still email my teacher and let her know? What if she doesn't reply?
Thank you so much!

Hi,

I think you're on the right track, but you do want to do a bit more background research. That being said, I think your questions are very important and definitely at the heart of a project that you might form.

How does plant growth happen?
How does plant growth work?
What causes plant growth to increase/decrease?
- For these kinds of questions, you should just be able to do background research on your own. Wikipedia (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Plant_grow ... evelopment) will have some general answers, but you also might want to look into actual biochemical factors, like auxins, cytokinins, ethylene, and gibberellins (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Plant_hormone). There are plenty that you can consider studying more in depth.

What is the relationship between plant growth and music?
- This question goes more toward the heart of your project. I think, for a high school project, you want to make the entire project more complex than just this question, but this is definitely a good start. I'd imagine that any experiment that you perform would compare some kind of music vs no music treatment on the effect of plant growth. So as a kind of preliminary experiment to generate very simple data, you might try treating groups of plants with different kinds, or no, music at all. If you do find a statistical difference between those groups (and I think you will, there has been quite a bit of previous research on this subject), then you can proceed to more complex questions.

How do plants detect music?
When does music cause plant growth?
- More complex questions like these ones. I think these are great questions that extend the depth of your project. Say you find that rock music slows plant growth more than classical music. You then might want to ask how plants 'detect' music, and a good hypothesis might deal with pressure differences in the air from the music since all sound is just moving air waves. You could design further experiments where you treat groups of plants with actual music versus just pressurized air waves. Or, if you wanted to ask when and where music causes plant growth, you could treat groups of plants with different music and then measure biochemical levels of, say, cytokinins since plant growth hormones tend to be site specific.

I think this could be a very good project with the questions that you want to ask.

Hope this helps!
Aaron Lin