Mozart - Classical Music to Calm Sleeping Babies

The Mozart Effect refers to a popular scientific theory that listening to Mozart’s compositions (and other classical music) will increase spatial intelligence. Most studies focus on children and their reactions when listening.

In 1993, psychologist Francis Rauscher created an experiment to test the relevance of listening to music and test-taking. He sat 36 college students in a room and played them 10 minutes of a Mozart Piano Sonata. After doing so, they were told to take a test of spatial reasoning (mentally manipulating objects and imagining them in different locations and positions).

Rauscher then took a group of students and played 10 minutes of silence and 10 minutes of a monotone voice. A spatial reasoning test was given after both recordings to each of the groups.

The results showed that the students scored significantly higher on the tests after listening to Mozart’s Sonata -- opening the floor to hundreds of new experiments.

After the news got out about Rauscher’s experiment, the theory was quickly distorted by the media.

"Generalizing these results to children is one of the first things that went wrong. Somehow or another the myth started exploding that children that listen to classical music from a young age will do better on the SAT, they'll score better on intelligence tests in general, and so forth.” -- Francis Rauscher

A common misconception is that the original experiment proves the effect of classical music on general intelligence, but Rauscher only tested for spatial.

Although Rauscher did not intend her results to apply to early childhood development theories, that did not stop other researches from connecting the dots.

According to the New York Times, playing Mozart does not result in a big gap between children’s spatial testing, but music involvement does.

Dr. Hetland, a cognitive psychologist, conducted 15 studies with 700 preschool and elementary age children that showed this to be true. The children received 15 minute periods of active musical instruction weekly. The control group of children either received arithmetic instruction or no instruction.

The analysis showed a large gap in spatial reasoning scores between the control group and those who had musical instruction, larger than that of the Mozart Effect’s results.

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