Little History/Origins Of The Mozart Effect

Intro/What is it

When you hear the words “Mozart Effect” a lot of different thoughts and ideas come to mind. Such as becoming a musical genius overnight or even the impact that Mozart had on music. While the latter of the two may hold some ground, that is not what the Mozart Effect is actually. The definition of the Mozart Effect, in layman's terms, is the claim that listening to Mozart can actually make the listener smarter. While there has been some variation to the comprehension, such as if children listen to Mozart’s music then they will become more intelligent by the minute, the original basis still stands, Mozart equals more smarts.

Little History/ Origins It all began in the spring of 1993 where psychologist Francis Rauscher performed an experiment on a group consisting of 36 college students. For ten minutes the students listened to piano sonatas made by Mozart, when the ten minutes were up, Rauscher gave each student a spatial reasoning test. This process repeated for two more trials but instead of Mozart, the students listened to silence and then someone speaking in a monotone voice.

"What we found was that the students who had listened to the Mozart Sonata scored significantly higher on the spatial temporal task." (Rauscher, 2010) is what Rauscher told NPR when she was reflecting on her famous Mozart experiment. As soon as the news broke out that Mozart can improve your intelligence, news outlets and the general American public went wild. It was as if everyone became Mozart’s biggest fan, along with this stores began stuffing shelves with CDs and other audio formats. Perhaps the most absurd thing to come out of the Mozart craze occurred in 1998 when Georgia's governor, Zell Miller, gave free classical music CDs to every newborn in the state of