In order to measure pessimism and optimism in pop
music quantitatively, one has to find a reliablemethod. Since health care
workers often employ the Visual Analogue Scale (VAS) to measurepatients’
subjective experiences of pain, the hypotheses in this study was that a similar
analogy to"no pain- extreme pain" could be also suited to a dichotomy
"extreme pessimism - extremeoptimism". To determine the reliability
and validity of the musical mood measurement scale apilot study was conducted.
Two test groups of students from the University of Helsinki (n=72) andthe
University of Turku (n=10) used the VAS scale to evaluate the moods of twenty
songs fromyears 2006 and 2009. The hypothesis was that year 2006 was an
optimistic time, while 2009represents a pessimistic period in Finnish society.

The results were surprisingly clear. The paired
two-sample (each student’s average rating for thesongs in the 2006 sample vs.
each student’s average rating for the songs in the 2009 sample) t-testshowed a
statistically significant difference of 2.0764 (t = 13.9369, df=81, one-tailed
p<0.0001).For example, the songs from 2006 were significantly more
optimistic than the songs from 2009.From the point of pop music education, to
recognize the meanings and the moods of certain songsand comparing them was
seen as an interesting and meaningful task. For many, it was a newapproach to
listen, to appreciate and to understand pop music.