(The) effect of harmonic congruency of music on information processing

Abstract

This paper investigates the situations in which sound logo is congruent or incongruent with the background music, and the extent to which this congruency has an impact on advertised message, such as brand and claim recall. Based on literatures from limited capacity theory and resource allocation, incongruency processing, musical expectation, music information-load, retroactive interference, and encoding strategy, hypotheses are developed. Two Experiments are conducted to assess the hypotheses about the effects of musical incongruency between background music and sound logo on brand and claim recall. Results show different memory patterns in terms of musical incongruency degree. In accordance with elaboration likelihood model (ELM), in low congruency condition, message concurrently presented with sound logo (brand name) processing is showed poor performance while sound logo is recalled better than other conditions (mutually exclusive processing). However, in high congruency condition, brand name appears to be less processed like in low congruency condition whereas sound logo is processed more than in low and moderately congruent condition. Moreover, in moderate congruency condition both brand name and sound logo show better processing than other conditions (parallel processing). Concerning message prior to sound logo (claims), the monotonic increasing pattern as musical congruency increase is found. Specifically, it is suggested that more researches are needed to further investigate usage of music in commercial, because music processing is cognitive activity and the processing area of syntactic relations in language and music musical syntax is overlapped in one``s brain.