July 29, 2021

Why Is The “Mozart Effect” Not Real?

You can order excellent quality papers of any complexity at Domypaper4me website.
This is one of the essay samples.

The “Mozart Effect” has limited and even insignificant influence in relation to the performance level of spatial-task testing in the latest studies on schoolchildren and college students. The so-called enhancement on performance started in the early ’90s from the study made by Rausche and colleagues. In the study, college students showed an increase in the performance level after exposure to the “allegro con spirito” of the Mozart sonata.

However, the most comprehensive and up-to-date meta-analysis was done on over 3000 subjects where each group was given either musical stimulus as the Mozart sonata, non-musical stimulus, and the absence of any stimuli separately. The results showed a minimal to none specific effect on the spatial task performance of the subjects under the three listening conditions (Pietschnig et al. 314).

Another study on college students showed no effect on either the number of maze recursions or the overall quality of maze solutions after exposure to three listening conditions such as the piano concerto by Mozart, repetitive relaxation music, and silence (Wilson et al. 365).

In a similar study, a large sample of 10 and 11-year-olds was divided accordingly and exposed to either Mozart,  contemporary pop music, or simple news broadcasting, then made to perform a square completion and folding paper test.  The results showed the group of children that listened to a piece of popular music at that time performing better than the rest. The study further shows consistency with other findings on the benefits of music listening, the kind of which is detrimental to one’s own liking(Schellenberg et al. 202).

In conclusion, an increase in performance level, if there is any in relation to musical stimuli cannot solely come from the “Mozart Effect” but can be a result of listening to the kind of music you like.