ABSTRACT
Fortunately, assigning people at random to music-listening experiences is relatively easy. Participants come to the laboratory and the experimenter randomly assigns each participant to one of two (or more) conditions. For example, half of them might listen to music, whereas the other half would be exposed to a different piece of music, a nonmusical auditory stimulus (e.g., a narrated story), or silence. If the groups prove to differ on a test that they take immediately after listening or while they are listening, the effect can be attributed to the different conditions. Another possibility is to assign each participant to all of the different conditions, making sure that the order of the conditions (e.g., music then silence, or silence then music) is divided equally (i.e., counterbalanced) among the participants.
