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.<br /><br />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).<br /><br />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.<br /><br />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.<br /><br />After the news got out about Rauscher’s experiment, the theory was quickly distorted by the media.<br /><br />"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<br /><br />A common misconception is that the original experiment proves the effect of classical music on general intelligence, but Rauscher only tested for spatial.<br /><br />Although Rauscher did not intend her results to apply to early childhood development theories, that did not stop other researches from connecting the dots.<br /><br />According to the New York Times, playing Mozart does not result in a big gap between children’s spatial testing, but music involvement does.<br /><br />Dr. Hetland, a cognitive psychologist, conducted 15 studies with 700 preschool and elementary age children that showed this to be true. The