https://www.forbes.com/sites/evaamsen/20...27e8962910
EXCERPT: For decades, headlines have claimed that Mozart’s music has all kinds of amazing effects on people’s behaviour and performance. But once you look closer at the different studies behind those headlines, the truth is often much simpler. Out of all possible music to look at, researchers often choose Mozart’s music when they just needed a sample of any type of music.
Much of the hype around Mozart’s effect on the brain started in 1993, with a single page letter in Nature called “Music and spatial task performance”. This paper reported the results of a study in which 36 college students performed spatial reasoning tasks after either listening to music, listening to a relaxation tape, or not listening to anything at all. The students who listened to music performed better.
It’s an interesting study, but it took on a life of its own once it hit the news. [...] Remember, this all came from a very small study involving 36 college students. ... the researchers themselves never claimed that there was anything special about Mozart. They just needed some music for their study, and they picked a well-known piece of music by a well-known composer.
Since then, there have been many other experiments that showed that listening to music can make it easier to carry out certain tasks or affect how people act. Very often, these studies use Mozart’s music. Not because there’s anything special about Mozart, but because it’s easy to come by, in the public domain, well-known — and often also because other people before them also used Mozart in their studies.
[...] There is a lot of really interesting research being done about how different types of music affect people, but they usually look at specific factors that determine how your brain processes the sound. For example, whether the piece of music is sung or instrumental could have an effect, or what the tempo of the music is. But whether something is Mozart or not does not have much meaning on its own... (MORE - missing details)
https://www.youtube-nocookie.com/embed/inaLmrmsfOY
EXCERPT: For decades, headlines have claimed that Mozart’s music has all kinds of amazing effects on people’s behaviour and performance. But once you look closer at the different studies behind those headlines, the truth is often much simpler. Out of all possible music to look at, researchers often choose Mozart’s music when they just needed a sample of any type of music.
Much of the hype around Mozart’s effect on the brain started in 1993, with a single page letter in Nature called “Music and spatial task performance”. This paper reported the results of a study in which 36 college students performed spatial reasoning tasks after either listening to music, listening to a relaxation tape, or not listening to anything at all. The students who listened to music performed better.
It’s an interesting study, but it took on a life of its own once it hit the news. [...] Remember, this all came from a very small study involving 36 college students. ... the researchers themselves never claimed that there was anything special about Mozart. They just needed some music for their study, and they picked a well-known piece of music by a well-known composer.
Since then, there have been many other experiments that showed that listening to music can make it easier to carry out certain tasks or affect how people act. Very often, these studies use Mozart’s music. Not because there’s anything special about Mozart, but because it’s easy to come by, in the public domain, well-known — and often also because other people before them also used Mozart in their studies.
[...] There is a lot of really interesting research being done about how different types of music affect people, but they usually look at specific factors that determine how your brain processes the sound. For example, whether the piece of music is sung or instrumental could have an effect, or what the tempo of the music is. But whether something is Mozart or not does not have much meaning on its own... (MORE - missing details)