More than 200 years after his death, Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart still has the ability to influence thousands of people around the world. The Mozart Effect, a technique originally described in the research of Alfred Tomatis, claims that the music of the Austrian composer has the power to reduce stress, clear minds and even boost intelligence.
In 1997, Don Campbell, the founder and former director of the Institute for Music, Health and Education, compiled and published The Mozart Effect, which outlined how listening to Mozart and other types of music can heal many mental stresses.
In addition to having effects on health, education and “well-being,” the Mozart Effect, according to Campbell’s website, Mozarteffect.com, can improve “the health of families and communities,” memory, attention deficit disorders, injuries, depression and anxiety.
But how does the Mozart Effect work?
According to Campbell, the Mozart Effect can occur simply by “selectively listening” to Mozart for 10 minutes, meaning the music is not playing in the background during other activities, but instead is the main focus of an individual.
Or, instead of listening to just Mozart, some people can benefit from listening to other types of music that can either stimulate the brain or calm it down.
The Mozart Effect can be even more significant for college students. Recent studies done at the University of California at Irvine were conducted on a few dozen college students regarding the effects of Mozart’s music on the brain. The results indicated that when the students listened to Mozart for a short amount of time, their average IQ increased temporarily.
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Campbell, a journalist and musician, has spearheaded an effort to install Mozart and other types of music in hospitals across the country. The idea is to soothe the minds of both staff and patients before surgery, in the waiting room or in recovery.
“To me, the Mozart Effect is much bigger,” Campbell said. “It’s more of the universal effects of what sound and music can do to improve our lives.”
Campbell said while no music is as beneficial as Mozart’s, students who are not fans of the Austrian composer’s symphonies can intellectually profit from other musical genres.
“More important than good music is good silence,” he said. “Can one deal with a quiet room? Can one live with a quiet mind? It’s exactly like food. Different kinds of music have different nutrients. The only bad music for you in the world is music that is very loud.”
Although Campbell is not “anti-any kind of music,” he said most popular music cannot have a positive effect on the brain because it is too distracting, specifically music with lyrics.
Campbell said he recommends 10 minutes of selective listening before studying to either calm the mind or stimulate it with the “right kind of nutrients.” For college students, the music used varies.
“Sometimes, just 10 minutes of classical guitar works,” he said. “That chills them out. Other times, they need to hear some music and get up and dance for five minutes, and then put on five minutes of Mozart to bring that order to the mind.”
And the music can have a positive effect on the brain’s intelligence, Campbell said.
“I call it relaxed stimulation,” he said. “If you’re over-stimulated or over-relaxed, you’re not working optimally. It’s very inexpensive, it’s very feasible and it’s very usable, and it does work.”
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For the Mozart Effect to have any effect on people, the brain must receive audio signals.
Pierre Divenyi, Chief of the Speech and Hearing Research Program at the Department of Veterans Affairs in Martinez, Calif., said the concept of auditory perception is very complicated.
“There are so many levels of auditory perception,” he said. “What we know a lot about is how the ear works up to the mid-brain. We know much less about how the cortex, the brain itself, organizes these complex signals.”
Divenyi, a former concert pianist, said composers transpose music to different keys because they know audiences can associate specific memories and moods with certain melodies and harmonies.
“The brain is interested in patterns, patterns that tell a certain shape, in terms of melodies or harmonies that have a certain feeling of completeness or a feeling of, ‘something needs to come after this,'” he said. “It’s quite an interesting area.”
Divenyi said the brain’s ability to remember melodies or harmonies and recognize them when repeated exemplifies the special connection between music and the brain.
When it comes to debate over the Mozart Effect, the beat goes on.
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Many people, including scientists and educators, cite numerous reasons for discrediting the Mozart Effect’s legitimacy.
“With the Mozart Effect, I don’t think there’s much implication for music education there,” College of Fine Arts Music Education Chair William McManus said. “I don’t think there’s been enough research done on it.”
McManus, who has studied music education for 40 years, said Mozart Effect research was never verified and the scope of the studies were limited. However, Campbell said many hospitals are playing music for their patients to calm them down.
“It points out that for researchers in the United States saying it’s bogus, they’ve never read [about hopital use of Mozart],” he said.
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One of the finest lines in the music education industry is drawn at the Mozart Effect. Campbell claims that the Mozart Effect is vital to music education.
“The Mozart Effect is talking about everything from different forms of music therapy to music education and creative listening,” he said, “so the Mozart Effect is a much broader topic in the work that I have done.”
However, to some like McManus, the field of music education does not have room for skeptical theories about music making people smarter. Although he said the Mozart Effect could be an exaggerated form of music’s ability to change the mood of people, it still lacks enough ground to qualify as an educating source.
“We have difficulty justifying music by saying it makes you smarter in the field of mathematics or the field of science or any other field,” McManus said. “We would rather justify music for its own good.”
In the CFA Music Education department, McManus focuses on how to develop the musical ability and understanding of children.
“We just feel that music is an extremely important part of anyone’s life,” he said, “and we want to give kids the skills and knowledge to participate in it as much as they can, either as a player, a performer or even as a listener.”
But Campbell said most Mozart Effect experiments were not conducted under the right conditions.
“The ones who got the big press about raising IQ and so forth did not take into consideration the time of day and the amount of food that these college students had,” he said. “There’s so much more that the listening and auditory process entails.”
Although Campbell insists both playing and listening to appropriate music can better the lives of individuals, many skeptics say the Mozart Effect is being exploited by some commercial organizations and instrument companies to justify the inclusion of music programs in high schools.
“[They are] trying to justify music programs by saying, ‘if kids participate in music programs, they’ll do better on SATs and in other subjects,'” McManus said. “I just think the research is really on pretty shaky ground.”