Mozart Effect

The Mozart effect can refer to:

The term was first coined by Alfred A. Tomatis who used Mozart's music as the listening stimulus in his work attempting to cure a variety of disorders. The approach has been popularized in Don Campbell's book, The Mozart Effect, which is based on an experiment published in Nature suggesting that listening to Mozart temporarily boosted scores on one portion of the IQ test. As a result, the United States' Governor of Georgia, Zell Miller, proposed a budget to provide every child born in Georgia with a CD of classical music.

The concept of the "Mozart effect" was described by French researcher Dr. Alfred A. Tomatis in his 1991 book Pourquoi Mozart? (Why Mozart?). He used the music of Mozart in his efforts to "retrain" the ear, and believed that listening to the music presented at differing frequencies helped the ear, and promoted healing and the development of the brain.

Rauscher, Shaw, and Ky (1993) investigated the effect of listening to music by Mozart on spatial reasoning, and the results were published in Nature. They gave research participants one of three standard tests of abstract spatial reasoning after they had experienced each of three listening conditions: the Sonata for Two Pianos in D major, K. 448 by Mozart, verbal relaxation instructions, and silence. They found a temporary enhancement of spatial-reasoning, as measured by spatial-reasoning sub tasks of the Stanford-Binet IQ test. Rauscher et al. show that the enhancing effect of the music condition is only temporary: no student had effects extending beyond the 15-minute period in which they were tested. The study makes no statement of an increase in IQ in general (because IQ was never measured).

While Rauscher et al. only showed an increase in "spatial intelligence", the results were popularly interpreted as an increase in general IQ. This misconception, and the fact that the music used in the study was by Mozart, had an obvious appeal to those who valued this music; the Mozart effect was thus widely reported. In 1994, New York Times music columnist Alex Ross wrote in a light-hearted article, "researchers [Rauscher and Shaw] have determined that listening to Mozart actually makes you smarter", and presented this as the final piece of evidence that Mozart has dethroned Beethoven as "the world's greatest composer. " A 1997 Boston Globe article mentioned some of the Rauscher and Shaw results. It described one study in which three- and four-year-olds who were given eight months of private piano lessons scored 34% higher on tests of spatio-temporal reasoning than control groups given computer lessons, singing lessons, and no training.

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