Recording - January 2020 - 16

What If Mozart Has Nothing
To Do With the Mozart Effect?
By Jack Sharkey for KEF

We've all heard of the Mozart Effect - that strange and wonderful power
classical music has that raises our IQs just enough to make us smarter than the
average person. I'm listening to Mozart's Piano Sonata in C Major, K.545:
I:Allegro as I type this, so we'll see how this all turns out.

But, what if there really
isn't a Mozart Effect?
In 1993 psychologist Frances Rauscher and her team published the paper
"Music and Spatial Task Performance"
in Nature magazine. Nature is the Big
Kahuna of science magazines so any article it publishes is going to get noticed
immediately. Within weeks, the Mozart
Effect was picked up in daily newspapers
and on television and spread around the
world - it went viral back in the day
when only the Bird Flu did such things.
The Mozart Effect was going to change
the level of intelligence across the board:
The State of New Hampshire started giving
out Mozart CDs to new mothers. The State
of Florida insisted that state funded day care
centers start piping in Mozart, but the State
of Texas topped them all by playing symphonies for state inmates in the prison system.
Expectant parents around the world put little
speakers on mom-to-be's bellies and played
hours of Eine Kleine Nachtmuzik.

The problem of intelligence
had been eradicated!
Except for one thing: Rauscher never
claimed that listening to Mozart increased
intelligence. All her findings pointed
out was that there had been three study
groups who were asked to predict what
pieces of paper would look like after they
were cut and folded based on a simple
drawing. One group listened to nothing
before the test, one group listened to the
instructions for the test being given in a relaxing tone, and the third group listened to
ten minutes of piano music by Mozart. The
results found that the group who listened to
Mozart performed better on the test than
the other two groups. Rauscher surmised
that the improvement was equivalent
16 RECORDING January 2020

to eight or 9 points on a standard IQ test
for spatial relations.
But once the world media got ahold of
the test, all of the nuance and subtlety of her
findings were lost in a rush to buy Mozart
records and get ourselves smart without having to Google a darn thing, and since this
was before Google, that was a major plus.
A few years later a study of eight thousand 9 and 10 year-olds in the United
Kingdom concluded it wasn't just Mozart
but it might actually be the pop band Blur.
In this test, one third of the kids listened to
the aforementioned Blur, while one third
listened to Mozart, and one third listened
to a psychologist talk about the test they
were taking. The kids then performed some
spatial tests and the test group who listened
to the music they liked best scored better
on the test, and of course, more nine and
10-year-olds like Blur better than Mozart.

But wait! There's more.
Another test of the Mozart Effect done at
the University of Toronto substituted Mozart
with an audio recording of a Stephen King
novel. You guessed it! The students who listened to the Stephen King novel did predictably better on the spatial relations test as
previous subjects had done with Mozart.
So now we have the Stephen King Effect.

This is where the Arousal
Theory comes in.
It's long been known that performance
results on tests such as the ones used in
these experiments are higher from subjects
who are in good spirits and not bored (opposite of aroused). Dopamine levels within the brain rise when you're in a good
mood and moderately stimulated, so
therefore you do better at the task at hand.
Conversely, how many times have you not

performed to your potential when you've
woken up late, were cut off in traffic on the
way to work or were aggravated because
the cat left a hairball on your pants?
So maybe it's not Mozart specifically,
but any aural stimulation you enjoy that
puts you in a good and positive state of
mind. Several other tests over the years
have proven that a good mood helps with
creativity while increased positive stimulation helps with problem solving tasks.

So, we should listen to music
while we do everything, right?
Maybe not. You cannot stop processing
music because you can't shut your ears
off, so therefore there's always a little bit
of your brain's processing power dedicated to processing even low levels of
background music. Is the music a distraction or is it masking a distraction? Is the
alternative to music a quiet room with no
distractions that allows all of your focus on
the task at hand, or is the music going to
mask background noise and aural clutter
that would otherwise distract you?
There are other factors as well. Does
the music have vocals or is it instrumental? Vocal music also requires the language processing part of your brain
to kick in, taking up even more of its
processing power. Also, the louder the
background music the more your brain
is required to process and pay attention
to it, leaving less room for other things.
It's probably safe to say that quiet, calm,
instrumental music is preferable to Danzig
at full volume, but music can be a great help
before and during many thinking tasks. It's
unfortunately not as easy as finding a Mozart playlist on Spotify and expecting your
brain to finally be able to do calculus.
I know, I tried.

Recording - January 2020

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