THE MOZART (SCHMOZART) EFFECT By
Chloe Palumbo Helen Wei
The “smart-baby” product industry has grown tremendously over the past few decades, gaining profound momentum grounded in the belief that classical music helps boost intelligence in infants–a phenomenon more commonly known as the Mozart effect. Whether in the form of CDs, interactive toys, or television programs, the societal obsession with distilling the wondrous powers of Mozart to augment intelligence in infants has captivated society for decades. But how accurate is the so-called Mozart effect and is there a scientific basis for this phenomenon? The term Mozart effect stems from a study conducted in 1993 by Rauscher and colleagues in which 36 college students listened to either 10 minutes of
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Mozart’s piano sonata, 10 minutes of silence, or 10 minutes of a monotonous voice prior to taking a spatial reasoning task–a test which measures one’s ability to conceive and alter three-dimensional relationships of objects in space over time. After the exam, the subjects’ spatiotemporal task scores were recorded across experimental groups and compared. Rauscher and colleagues found that participants who listened to Mozart’s piano sonata performed significantly better on the spatial reasoning relative to those who listened to a non-musical stimulus or silence, however, such improvements persisted for only 10-15 minutes after listening. From this, Rauscher et al. concluded that there was some short-term correlation between spatiotemporal task
score and listening to Mozart’s piano sonata. Shortly after the Rauscher et al. findings were published, the press eagerly jumped at the opportunity to spread the word to the public. However, amidst the public frenzy, loads of generalizations ensued and Rauscher et al.’s findings became progressively more distorted as the American public became entranced by the notion that listening to Mozart makes you smarter. The modest study conducted on young adults that measured spatiotemporal task score was suddenly transformed into the generalization that children who listened to classical music from a younger age could achieve higher SAT scores and IQs. The public’s fervent conviction that listening to Mozart helps boost
