The Mozart Effect Was Never About Mozart

In October 1993 the journal Nature published a short report by Frances Rauscher, Gordon Shaw and Katherine Ky describing an experiment on 36 college students. After listening for ten minutes to a Mozart sonata for two pianos, the students did better on a spatial reasoning task than after sitting in silence or listening to a relaxation tape. The gain was about eight or nine points on a scale of spatial intelligence, and it faded within fifteen minutes.

The authors made no claim about babies and none about intelligence in general. Rauscher has said since that she never suggested that listening to Mozart would make children smarter. But the phrase the Mozart effect was already in circulation, and it slipped from the laboratory into the shops.

In 1998 Zell Miller, the governor of Georgia, asked his legislature for about 105,000 dollars so that every newborn in the state could be sent a classical music recording. Florida soon passed a law requiring child care centres that received state money to play classical music every day. A modest result about adults and spatial puzzles had become a policy about infants and intelligence.

A modest result about adults and spatial puzzles had become a policy about infants and intelligence.

Later research did not support the larger hope. In 1999 the psychologist Christopher Chabris pooled the early studies and found a boost of little more than a point and a half. A larger review in 2010 found no sign that the music of Mozart mattered in particular.

A better explanation was offered by E. Glenn Schellenberg and others. In their experiments people who listened to music or to a story that they enjoyed did better afterwards than people who sat in silence, and the benefit seemed to follow mood and alertness and not the structure of the music.

The Mozart effect, then, is real in a narrow sense but it is not about Mozart, and it is not about intelligence either. It is about a brief lift in a pleasant mind. Even so, the belief that music improves a person has never faded, and parents who play sonatas to a sleeping child are neither wholly mistaken nor wholly right. What music does over years and not minutes is a question that these experiments were never built to ask.