The Mozart Effect - IELTS Reading Answers & Explanations

Read the article below and answer Questions 27–40.

The Mozart Effect

In 1993 Frances Rauscher and Gordon Shaw conducted an experiment in which a group of students listened to Mozart's Sonata for Two Pianos in D Major for 10 minutes prior to doing an IQ test. Their results showed a temporary increase in their IQ scores. The media picked up on this and called it 'the Mozart effect'. The discovery had an immediate social and political effect, with the Governor of Georgia, USA, spending $105,000 to give every family in the state a recording of Mozart's music to play to their children.

However, using music in the interest of health has had a long history. Prior to Rauscher and Shaw's experiment, Dr Alfred Tomatis, a French ear, nose and throat specialist, pioneered using music in the treatment of children with speech and communication disorders such as autism or dyslexia. He found that music made a difference in their treatment. Tomatis started to look at the anatomy of sound and how it affects the brain. But why did he choose Mozart instead of other composers?

First of all, Tomatis distinguished between listening and hearing; hearing is seen as a passive process where sounds flood into our awareness, whereas listening is an active process that can be trained. Secondly, he believed that high-frequency sounds stimulate connections between the ear and the central nervous system, and playing music that contains high-frequency sounds is one of the ways we can train children to listen better. Consequently, some pieces of music are better than others and Tomatis found that Mozart's music contains lots of high-frequency sounds. Thus, he thought that Mozart's music could be used in the treatment of certain conditions.

Although other studies have not been able to replicate the original research of Tomatis and Rauscher and Shaw, the idea that music can be an aid to learning has not disappeared. In fact, other studies seem to show that music does have a positive effect on children with communication and learning difficulties. At Aberdare Boys School, Anne Savan taught children with special needs, 'They lacked co-ordination,' she said. 'They were often frustrated with the tasks set for them and became aggressive. The whole thing was a stressful situation.' Savan had been playing background music to the children for five months, and then by chance she played Mozart to them. Almost immediately the children became calmer and more productive. On observing this and making sure it was not an accident, Savan set up a research project with the University of Reading. They measured children's physiological signs (blood pressure, body temperature, respiration and pulse rate) when music was played at the start of a lesson, 20 minutes into the lesson and one hour after the lesson had finished in order to create a profile.

Savan found a 10 per cent drop in the physiological parameters when music was played after 20 minutes. She started by playing Mozart to the children and then progressed to other music, but found that other music produced no statistically significant response. The next thing she tried was to play different Mozart pieces but found that not all his music had an effect: only orchestral music without piano or human voice produced a response. She then looked at the structure of the music and its rhythm: she sped up the music and slowed it down but the children's physiological signs stayed unchanged. She then went on to look at the patterns within the music: she played the music backwards to the children but with only little effect. Like Tomatis before her, Savan experimented with the frequency; she took out the high frequencies and low frequencies in turn but had only a poor response, and concluded that a combination of factors are needed to produce the response.

In an attempt to pin down which combination of factors could be responsible for the effect, in 2001 John Hughes analysed the periodicity, or patterns, in Mozart's music. He found that Mozart's music contained a high level of repetition of patterns within 10–60 seconds of each other. The Sonata for Two Pianos in D Major certainly does contain repetition of musical patterns and phrases as the two pianos play patterns and reply to each other. Unfortunately, despite the promise of early studies and investigations into whether it is the high frequencies within the music, its rhythm or patterns, no direct link has yet been established to definitely prove that the Mozart effect truly exists.