The Mozart Effect

The Mozart Effect

Introduction

Music is perhaps among the most soothing and creative form of entertainment available in the modern age. Music goes far beyond the level that is achieved by any other form of entertainment by touching the heart and soul of the listener. It is due to these impacts that researchers have focused on investing into the factors that have a huge role to play in creating that mesmerizing effect on its listener. Moreover, the effect that music can have on other physical and mental activates has been under the scrutiny by the researchers for a long time. Music is a language that is spoken and understood by people belonging to different social, cultural and religious backgrounds.

Researchers are posed a massive challenge in quantifying the nature and specifying the scope of music's influence on human experience. The “Mozart Effect”, is the name given to a research finding (Rauscher, Shaw, & Ky, 1993) that has had a major influence on the correlation between music and the cognitive and physical performance of its listener.

Discussion

Article: Music and Spatial Task Performance

The study is based on the hypothesis that there exists a correlation between the cognitive performance of an individual and the music composed by Mozart. The research was boosted by the historical research that showed that listening to soothing music written and composed by Mozart can improve the cognitive capabilities of an individual.

In order to provide credibility to the research, students belonging to different educational backgrounds were exposed to three different controlled environments. These environments used three very different techniques that were deemed to play an important role in improving the performance of the students. During the test factors like time, equipment, music, and cognitive performance evaluation test were kept constant for all the three methods. This was necessary to improve the credibility of the research method employed by conducting the experiment under similar conditions.

The researchers collected scores gathered from the analysis of the responses and performance of the subjects in the spatial reasoning tasks. These tasks consisted of analyzing the various patterns, solving matrices from a given set and cuttings tests. The scoring method was laid out by using the SAS (Stanford-Binet Intelligence Scale). The standard deviation was calculated for all three scenarios and later these scores were translated into IQ equivalents. These IQ scores show that students who were subject to Mozart music had achieved the highest results. The results are achieved after conducting the experiments in a scientific manner; therefore the empirical results are valid along with the conclusions drawn from them.

Researchers concluded that by listening to 10 minutes of Mozart's composed sonata, the individuals could boost their performance on an abstract reasoning test developed by the Stanford-Binet Intelligence Scale. Specifically, an increase in IQ performance of 8-9 points was observed over the methods relying on relaxation techniques employing listening to tapes and observing silence.

These results opened a new horizon for research into the effects of music on the cognitive capabilities that could be unlocked ...