Is Fatigue Setting In During Your Music Test?

Why wonder?

One of the concerns some programmers have about music research is the possibility that people will get fatigued during a music test, and test scores will fall off. Obviously, the more songs in a test, the greater the concern.

I've just added to MusicVISTA a Fatigue Analysis report. This report will track how the average score changed during the course of the test.

For the station whose report is displayed above, there was a slightly higher score for the first group of 100, but then no fatigue is evident, right through to the 601-700 group. That suggests that for this station, the number of songs tested was probably not too high.

One thing I've noticed over the years: Programmers often put stronger music in the first group of songs. That, of course, will and should increase the average score of the first group. If that bothers you, mix up the test order very thoroughly.

Two other notes:

I'm breaking the test up into halves, then groups of 100 songs, and finally groups of just 25 songs each.

This report will track any test result. Examples: You can look at burn. You can see if "favorite" ratings fall off during the test.