Executive Summary

In this study, we sought to find out whether or not DePaul students are aware of the vast changes in technology in today's day and age as we evolve into an increasingly digital society. Digital formats make music easier to distribute and more accessible to a wider audience of people.

Our hypotheses narrowed our focus in this respect, questioning whether or not our potential subjects believe that it is more possible now to compose and distribute music than ever before. In addition, we made the hypothesis that these same subjects are able to access music in more cost-efficient ways than in years past. Finally, we assumed that our subjects felt positively about these changes and sought to support that claim by asking if technology affects their relationship to music in any way, positive or negative.

For our survey itself, we began with a series of demographic questions in order to get some background information on our test subjects, including their age demographic and the way that music affects their daily life. We also tried to get a taste of what time period the music they listen to is from by asking if it was created before or after the year 2000. In order to test the results of our hypotheses, we asked a series of questions directly related to our hypotheses. We asked our subjects whether or not they think music is easier to compose and discover then in the past, while giving them the option to say "I don't know" if they are unaware of the changes we are asking about. We asked three questions that were interrelated in order to find out if people alter the ways they listen to music for the sake of convenience. We wanted to know what they use to play their music, giving them a choice between MP3 players and more traditional methods of listening, including the AM/FM radio. In addition, we asked them if cost-efficiency affects the way they listen to music. These questions are particularly important because there is a difference between convenience and preference. At the end of our survey, we provide room for the subject to write why they prefer digital or analog methods of recording. Asking these questions helps us to bridge the gap between convenience and simply preference. Finally, we gave the subject room to write any ways in which technology has affected their relationship to music. We chose a broad question so that we give the subject the chance to tell us anything that may be helpful to our overall purpose, but not included in our other survey questions.

We performed pilot tests and made changes to our initial questions before arriving at the questions described above. Through our pilot testing, we realized that we needed to include options for every party involved and be sure to leave an "I don't know" option for anyone who the question does not relate to. We concluded that the way we are testing is an example of "convenience sampling" because the test subjects are presented to us. We are not going out to test random subjects.

Our testing comes with certain limitations. For instance, we are testing a small number of students from DePaul who are all enrolled in the same course. This may not represent the greater body of students at DePaul. HCI201 is an online course, which means that our test subjects might be more likely to be accepting of digital media, as they prefer to take an online course and therefore have some level of technological knowledge.

Our results generally supported our initial hypotheses. We found that Our demographic mainly consisted of people aged 20-23, half of which considered themselves music enthusiasts. Most of our subjects listen to music created after 1945, although about 35% of them listen to music created both before and after 1945. We predicted that our subjects would say that it is easier to create and discover music, while it is also less expensive than five years ago. All of these predictions were supported overwhelmingly. Finally, we predicted that our subjects mostly used digital forms of media instead of analog. We speculated that convenience played a factor in this trend, which our results support.

In our discussion section, we analyze the correlation between the results of our demographic questions and the rest of our questions. We speculate that our small, controlled subject group may have a bias towards the answers we predicted, as they have access to the internet and new technologies. In our discussion section we also question the validity of the answers provided by our subjects. We ask, "do all of our subjects know the sound quality difference between analog and digital recordings? Is convenience their only means for choosing their media players?"

In our conclusion section, we talk about how similar our predictions were to our results. We concluded that we were hardly surprised at all by our results, but realize that in order for this survey to be taken more seriously, we would need a larger audience. In addition to a larger audience, we would need an audience that comes from a wide variety of economic levels and geographic locations.

Will's Website

email Will Brocker at: willbrockermusic@gmail.com

Amy's Website

email Amy Sinclair at: amysinclair25@yahoo.com

All photos in slide show by Amy Sinclair

Flag image courtesy of www.ahouseofflags.com

Last Updated: June 7th, 2011