The Mozart Effect: Relationship Between Mozart's Music And Children

The Mozart Effect is the idea that listening to Mozart’s music will improve mental development and intelligence in babies or children. This idea is a rather generalized version of the study done by psychologist Frances Rauscher in 1993, which suggested that listening to Mozart enhanced spatial reasoning skills in college-aged adolescents. Students listened to either 10 minutes of a Mozart sonata in D minor or 10 minutes of absolute silence before performing spatial reasoning tasks. Those who listened to Mozart showed an improvement of 8 to 9 spatial IQ points (Swaminathan, 2007). Although children are never discussed in this study, the relationship between children’s intelligence and Mozart’s music is highly popularized in today’s society.

The benefits that stem from listening to music are fleeting and does not actually show any signs of increasing intelligence. In 2010, a meta-analysis of multiple studies since 1993 on the subject showed the positive effects of listening to Mozart. However, these results were caused by much more than simply hearing a 10-minute sonata. Researchers found that reading passages from Stephen King novels had the same effect, as well as listening to other classical artists such as Schubert (Hammond, 2013). It proves that so long as the subject is engaged in what the subject is hearing, the results will be stronger. In a 2006 study, over 8,000 children were recruited to listen to Mozart’s string quintet in D minor, a discussion regarding the experiment, or a sequence of three popular songs from the time. After hearing one of the three stimuli, the children were asked to participate in two spatial reasoning tasks. The first task involved deciding whether or not two line-drawings could be connected to create a square. For the second task, subjects viewed line-drawings of paper being folded multiple times and then cut. Subjects were then asked to identify a line-drawing that best represented the newly cut paper when unfolded. The end result showed that the children who listened to pop music performed their tasks better than the children who listened to Mozart or the discussion about the experiment (Schellenberg & Hallam, 2006). This once again proves that the type of music is not particularly important, even in the spatial reasoning of