There is an alchemy to science. Sometimes, when the conditions are just right, the results of tiny, preliminary studies are transformed into truisms that spread the world over. For example, everyone knows that you’re either left-brained or right-brained… except that that is false. What is true is that some brain functions tend to involve one half of the brain more than the other, but the idea that scientists are left-brained while artists are right-brained is nonsense. Yet, the belief endures. When science goes public, it can become magic.
The Mozart effect is a scientific legend. It’s the idea that playing Mozart’s music to a baby will make them smart. We know it isn’t true. But it started with a nugget of science back in 1993. What happened next is a cautionary tale for how these legends spread. The media half-remembers the study and twists its findings, and the story starts morphing in the telling until it finds a shape the public views as desirable.
This is a story of scientists hounded by the media, trying to evade death threats. It is also about how scientific studies are portrayed as sacred rituals when they fail to replicate.
But most importantly, it’s about how minimalist composer Philip Glass’ music was unfairly demonized in an attempt to prove a theory.
Can you unfold this piece of paper in your mind?
I have to warn you: the origin of the Mozart effect is profoundly disappointing. If you are expecting rows of newborns in their bassinets listening to Don Giovanni and being followed for decades to see how they score on IQ tests, you will not believe how this legend actually got its start.
The year is 1993 and the publication is the prestigious academic journal Nature. The whole study takes up about two thirds of a single page. Three scientists at the University of California, Irvine—Frances Rauscher, Gordon Shaw, and Katherine Ky—put 36 college students through a little experiment. They had them listen to ten minutes of Mozart’s sonata for two pianos in D major (K.488), then do a task. They then played ten minutes from a relaxation tape, followed by a similar task. Finally, they let them sit in silence for ten minutes before asking them to complete a similar task again. The order of these three parts was shuffled, but it didn’t make a difference: performance was greatest after listening to Mozart.
What was the task? It was an excerpt from the Stanford-Binet intelligence test, specifically questions having to do with manipulating objects in three dimensions in your mind (i.e. spatial reasoning). Students were shown, for example, images of a piece of paper that was folded in multiple ways sequentially, with corners cut out, and they had to imagine what would happen if you would unfold this piece of paper. They were asked to find the correct shape out of a list of multiple choices. The researchers would later claim their study had nothing to do with intelligence as a whole or IQ tests, but the building blocks were there. They used a well-known intelligence test and they even converted their students’ scores into “IQ equivalents,” writing that “the IQs of subjects participating in the music condition were 8-9 points above their IQ scores in the other two conditions.” The last paragraph cautions the reader: this effect did not last beyond 10 to 15 minutes.
Dr. Rauscher later told NPR that the first phone call she received about her study was from the Associated Press. Immediately, this tiny study conducted in a few dozen students reporting a temporary benefit had escaped the ivory tower. She was interviewed by Tom Brokaw on the nightly news and had to hire an assistant to manage her incoming calls. When she was misquoted in the media as implying that listening to rock music wasn’t good for your brain, she started receiving death threats, which led her to unlist her phone number.
The media played a very important role in the alchemical transformation of this study into the Mozart effect we are now familiar with. Two Stanford scientists later traced how journalists covered this story over time: in the year following the publication of the 1993 study, 80% of its media coverage mentioned “college students”… but after 2000, it was down to 30%. From 1997 onwards, more news articles mentioned infants than college students when reporting on the Mozart effect, even though it had not been tested on infants. That year, though, Rauscher and Shaw published the results of a study in which children received musical training, and that increased their ability to move shapes around in space. But they weren’t infants and they weren’t listening to Mozart; they were learning to play the piano.
Why were we told that scientists had found that babies listening to Mozart would get smarter? Because that’s what people wanted to believe.
How college students became babies
In a 2015 paper, Clémentine Beauvais, who holds a doctorate in education, looked at the Mozart effect through a lens I am less familiar with: sociology. What was in the proverbial soil in the 1990s that allowed this legend to grow, she asked herself.
The film Amadeus, which won a slew of prizes including the Academy Award for Best Picture, was released in 1984 and the bicentenary of Mozart’s death was celebrated in 1991. You could say the public had Mozart on the mind. Not only that, but the Space Race of the 1950s and 60s had made Americans anxious about their ability to raise brilliant children who would excel later in life, and President George H. W. Bush declared the 1990s the Decade of the Brain. Mozart was seen as an intellectual and artistic aspiration: nudged into brilliance by his father Leopold, Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart is the only composer whom we spontaneously imagine as a child, whose classical music is at once upper class and appealing to the masses. Like the relics of saints or the violins of master musicians, Mozart’s music became, in the 90s, a form of “contagious magic,” as Beauvais puts it. It contained his genius, and by playing it back, worried parents could ensure the future success of their progeny.
The Mozart effect mutated into borderline lunacy. In 1998, the State of Georgia passed a bill to distribute a free classical music CD or cassette tape (not exclusively Mozart’s music) to new mothers. Georgia’s governor at the time, Zell Miller, is a perfect example of the magical thinking present here. He played an excerpt from “Ode to Joy” to lawmakers prior to the bill passing, asking them if they felt smarter having listened to it, “smart enough to vote for this budget item.” The only problem is that “Ode to Joy” was not composed by Mozart, but by Beethoven. Miller himself had focused his bill on “spatial, temporal reasoning,” clearly influenced by the 1993 study that birthed the Mozart effect, but he got the composer wrong. Mozart’s music has been played in one Korean amusem*nt park to encourage two million roses to germinate. We are far from that 1993 study.
Governor Miller’s CD was financed by the state, but others were profiting from Mozart’s brain-shaping magic. Music teacher Don Campbell copyrighted the phrase “Mozart effect” and released a number of products, including books and CDs, claiming Mozart’s music had the power to heal the body, while William and Julie Clark came up with consumer goods under names like “Baby Mozart” and “Baby Einstein,” the latter of which was sold to Disney in 2001. (The brand is now owned by Kids II, Inc.)
While this public-facing alchemy was taking place, scientists were trying to replicate the precious findings first published in 1993. What happened in academia is a reflection of the work the media did on this story: turning experiments into a sacred ritual.
Getting the recipe right
Many researchers tried to reproduce the Mozart effect study in one way or another, and in 1999, the journal Nature published a scathing meta-analysis of 16 of these studies. Listening to ten minutes of Mozart’s music did not enhance general intelligence, although there was a small improvement in a person’s ability to transform visual images in their mind, the effect that had been claimed in the original study. But this was one specific task, and the effect was much smaller than originally reported and not even statistically significant. You get more variation in the results from testing someone’s IQ multiple times. The authors concluded that a requiem may be in order for the Mozart effect.
The debate, however, did not abate in the pages of the scientific literature. Frances Rauscher said that some studies did vindicate her original finding, while some did not. “Because some people cannot get bread to rise,” she wrote, “does not negate the existence of a ‘yeast effect.’” Many scientists, perhaps influenced by the media coverage, were testing their participants for increases in general intelligence, but that had never been the Mozart effect; it had to do with the ability to unfold complex shapes in your mind, and it wasn’t meant to last very long. Scientists who didn’t believe in the effect argued that students were simply enjoying Mozart’s music more, which gave them a boost when filling out the test. The counter-argument was that it had seemingly worked on epileptic patients in a coma (more on that later) and in rats listening to Mozart in their mother’s womb.
Rauscher went on to criticize many studies that failed to replicate her original finding: they hadn’t used the right kind of visuospatial task, and the researchers hadn’t prompted their participants to “listen carefully” before the music played. While getting the details right is important in reproducibility work, it started to feel like this famous experiment was a ritual that had to be performed just right to detect its miraculous outcome.
It's fair to say that by 2010 we had our answer. The largest meta-analysis done on this topic came up empty. Interestingly enough, its authors found that the studies done by Rauscher and others in her close circle reported a Mozart effect more than three times as big as studies done by other groups. But the topic itself could reliably be put to bed.
Except that legends never truly die, and the Mozart effect has now shifted to being portrayed as a boon to people dealing with epilepsy. The link isn’t new and dates back to 1998, at the height of the Mozart effect, and involves one of the original trio of researchers. Two recent reviews of the data, however, show that the studies are not very good, and most come from a single group of researchers. Listening to Mozart “may,” we are told, reduce seizures in people with epilepsy, but I would not trust such preliminary results.
Journalists certainly played an important role in the crafting of this scientific legend, but researchers themselves shouldn’t be left off the hook. When faced with questionable results from tiny studies, many started hypothesizing how Mozart’s music might influence the brain before considering that it probably didn’t. I read speculation that the “superior architecture” of the Classical composer’s music (like a cathedral!) would resonate with the “superorganization of the cerebral cortex” to normalize any suboptimal brain functions. When minimalist composer Philip Glass’ own music was used in studies in opposition to Mozart’s, it was denounced as “nonenhancing” and “predictable,” too repetitive, even unpleasant. Without his consent, Glass’ award-winning music was transformed by laboratory scientists as Mozart’s enemy, the simpleton to Mozart’s sophisticate.
There are many scientific legends like the Mozart effect. I still hear people talk about the French paradox—“how come French people have less heart disease than the Americans even though they eat a lot of saturated fats? could it be the wine they drink?” —even though this myth has been thoroughly debunked. These legends spread in part because the media covers them uncritically. When writing a post-mortem on the Mozart effect, Adrian Bangerter and Chip Heath from Stanford University explained that there are three phases to how the media reported on the Mozart effect. First, there was short-lived interest. Then, stable interest and endorsem*nt of the effect. Finally, there were the ”remember when we used to believe the Mozart effect was real?” pieces. The effect was now clearly clichéd and ridiculous. The authors write, “We find it ironic that, only a few years after enthusiastically reporting the Mozart effect, media discourse switched to skepticism and incredulous reminiscences.” As has been pointed out, if Mozart’s music truly delivered a spike in intelligence, the world’s smartest people would be the Mozart specialists.
You can absolutely play Mozart’s sonata for two pianos in D major to your newborn. It is a lively yet restrained piece from the Classical period. It has none of the brash drama that the Romantics would later bring to music, but it has its own exuberance and makes for a good listen. But you can also let your baby listen to Philip Glass’ film scores for The Hours or Roving Mars. (You can keep Notes on a Scandal to yourself: too much anxiety in this masterful score.) None of it will turn your progeny into geniuses. But music for the sake of music is good for the spirit.
Take-home message:
- The Mozart effect is often portrayed as the idea that playing Mozart’s music (or simply classical music) to a baby will make them smart
- The original study into this was done in a few dozen college students. The effect was short-lived and was not even a boost in general intelligence, but in a very specific type of mental exercise
- Studies of studies have since shown that the effect was never real
