On Thu, 16 Jun 2005, Tommy Kelly wrote:
>> "The idea for the Mozart effect originated in 1993 at the University of
>> California, Irvine, with physicist Gordon Shaw and Frances Rauscher, a
>> former concert cellist and an expert on cognitive development. They studied
>> the effects on a few dozen college students of listening to the first 10
>> minutes of the Mozart Sonata for Two Pianos in D Major (K.448). They found a
>> temporary enhancement of spatial-temporal reasoning, as measured by the
>> Stanford-Binet IQ test. No one else has been able to duplicate their
>> results."
>Here's an interesting conceptual replication, though: researchers
>randomly assigned grade school children to music lessons, drama lessons,
>or no after school program. Academic performance a year later was
>significantly higher for the children who participated in the music
>program. I don't have the reference here at home, but there are
>a number of examples of rigorous experimental studies with the same
>result: music education/exposure enhances cognitive ability.
Well, we'd really need some sort of non-art enrichment program, too, so we'd see whether it was the art or just the extra attention which helped the kids.
But what really interests me about this--and I don't think any sensible person would disagree that arts classes in schools help kids, though people might differ about how much to allocate to those classes--is that it's described, not as the "music effect" but as the "Mozart effect". It's less a claim about art than about class--listening to _the right music_ will make you smarter. Let's test those kids with _Kind of Blue_ (or, hell, Vince Guaraldi) and see if there's a "Miles effect", in some better world.
All the best,
John A