What exactly IS “The Mozart Effect?”  People are always asking me what it is about Mozart’s music that is healing or helpful. Why isn’t Haydn’s music as powerful, or Beethoven’s or Schubert’s? Actually, I believe that any great composer’s music can be healing, keeping in mind our definition of healing. Remember that we define healing as “amelioration of symptoms.” Healing is not synonomous with curing!

Starting back in the 1950′s, a brilliant French ear, nose, and throat doctor and surgeon with a great love of music, starting treating many opera singers with various physical symptoms that prevented them from singing like they had. This man was Dr. Alfred Tomatis. One of his statements that was someone novel at the time was “the human voice cannot reproduce sounds that it cannot hear.” Dr. Tomatis looked at hearing deficiencies that the patients exhibited and discovered that when the patients listened to Mozart’s five violin concertos, in particular, that their hearing improved. Dr. Tomatis determined that these particular pieces of Mozart had the perfect range of pitches and the perfect timbre or tone color to heal the voice and the individual.

In the 1990′s research was being conducted at the University of California at Irvine in which Mozart’s Sonata in D Major for two pianos was being played for high school students about to take the SAT. In each trial, the students were divided into three groups. One group listened to their favorite pop music for 30 minutes before the test, one listened to nothing and one group listened to the Mozart piece. Repeatedly, the students who listened to the Mozart piece scored higher.

These two phenomena constributed to the idea of a “Mozart Effect.” I personally believe that the media has greatly exaggerated the power of Mozart however I do believe that Mozart’s music is healing, inspiring, beautiful, uplifting and amazing. Many people believe that Mozart was the greatest composer of all time because in his brief life, he was a master of every genre he attempted and he attempted all of the genres of his time: sonatas, symphonies, chamber music, opera, and choral music. If you haven’t listened to any Mozart lately, treat yourself to some tonight!

A new study had just been published in the journal Pediatrics, suggesting that playing Mozart for preemies can speed up weight gain!
”
.Playing Mozart music to premature babies seems to help them gain weight faster and become stronger, new research found.

Once a day for two consecutive days, doctors played either 30 minutes of music by the 18th-century composer Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart, or no music, to 20 pre-term babies at the Tel Aviv Medical Center in Israel. After listening to the music, the babies were calmer and so expended less energy than the no-music group. When babies’ energy expenditure is decreased, they don’t need as many calories to grow, so can gain weight and thrive more quickly – exactly what preemies need.

“It’s not exactly clear how the music is affecting them, but it makes them calmer and less likely to be agitated,” said researcher Dror Mandel, a lecturer at Tel Aviv University.

Though the sample size was small, the scientists said their findings were statistically significant.

Previous research has shown that music can reduce stress, decrease heart rate, and increase oxygen saturation in preterm infants. Oxygen saturation is a measure of the amount of oxygen carried in the blood relative to the maximum amount the blood could carry. When this number gets low it can be a sign of heart or lung problems.

The researchers didn’t try playing any music other than Mozart’s, so they don’t know whether the effect would hold true for other tunes.

“We want to know if what we found is a Mozart effect, or just music,” Mandel told LiveScience. “I think that other composers will also have effects, however it might be that the Mozart music has particular effects compared to other composers.”

The researchers decided to try Mozart music because of a 1993 study that found that college students could temporarily improve their performance on spatial–temporal tasks by listening to a Mozart sonata for 10 minutes a day.

“The repetitive melodies in Mozart’s music may be affecting the organizational centers of the brain’s cortex,” Mandel said. “Unlike Beethoven, Bach or Bartok, Mozart’s music is composed with a melody that is highly repetitive.”

However, the so-called Mozart effect has sometimes been taken too far. A company called Baby Einstein (now owned by Disney) that publishes a series of Baby Mozart videos and music disks offered a refund last year for all Baby Einstein videos, after receiving complaints that the company had falsely claimed the videos were educational.

The Israeli researchers plan to test out different kinds of music soon. One team member suggested that rap music might evoke the same response as Mozart, since it has a similar pulsating and repetitive frequency.

Mandel and his colleague Ronit Lubetzky published their findings in the January issue of the journal Pediatrics. ”
By Clara Moskowitz, LiveScience Staff Writer

posted: 13 January 2010 09:18 am ET

So many people ask me this and it’s a great questions! After all the info came out on the “Mozart Effect” people were getting really excited about improving their intelligence and their test scores with music! Here is what one of the scientific studies had to say about it:

Improve your vocabulary with music!

In 1982, researchers from the University of North Texas performed a three-way test on postgraduate students to see if music could help in memorizing vocabulary words. The students were divided into three groups. Each group was given three tests – a pretest, a posttest, and a test a week after the first two tests. All of the tests were identical. Group 1 was read the words with Handel’s Water Music in the background. They were also asked to imagine the words. Group 2 was read the same words also with Handel’s Water Music in the background. Group 2 was not asked to imagine the words. Group 3 was only read the words, was not given any background music, and was also not asked to imagine the words. The results from the first two tests showed that groups 1 and 2 had much better scores than group 3. The results from the third test, a week later, showed that group 1 performed much better than groups 2 or 3. However, simply using music while learning does not absolutely guarantee recall but can possibly improve it. Background music in itself is not a part of the learning process, but it does enter into memory along with the information learned. Recall is better when the same music used for learning is used during recall. Also, tempo appears to be a key of music’s effect on memory.

One of the most frequent questions I get is about the so-called Mozart Effect. As a friend of Don Campbell, the man who wrote the book and coined the phrase, I answer questions as best I can. As I write in my blog www.whymozart.blogspot.com, the media got hold of the phrase “The Mozart Effect” and commercialized it far more than Don ever had. Articles began to appear stating that listening to Mozart’s music would raise your child’s IQ, but of course that would be impossible!
Just a few minutes ago I came across this YouTube video that also has a lot of explanation about the Mozart Effect and i wanted to share it with all of my followers! Let me know what you think!

People ask me that all the time and of course, the answer is an absolute MAYBE? 

Is Mozart’s music the most healing music of all?

What do you really know about “The Mozart Effect?” It seems to me that many musicians are a bit “up in arms” about the whole premise. I, as a musician and a therapist, truly believe that the whole idea has been misunderstood. Neither the woman who did the original studies nor Don Campbell who came up with the idea of trademarking and writing a book called “The Mozart Effect” ever said that the music of Mozart is the most healing of all or that it raises anyone’s IQ!! A very good source to look at for information is: http://www.time.com/time/magazine/article/0,9171,901060116-1147107,00.html.
I also have a recorded program called “Healing with Music: Why Mozart?” that I think you would find very informative and factual…and entertaining! Check it out at www.HealingMusicEnterprises.com/products.html

Can Mozart help a pregnant woman?

I work a lot with pregnant women and they all want to know about the very best music to listen to during their pregnancy. Of course I always tell them that their voice singing to their unborn child is the best. The mother’s voice is the one that baby hears first and most often while in utero and therefore that one that makes baby feel safe.

But what about Mozart? Well, many Marketers jumped in on the whole “Mozart Effect” media blitz and said that Mozart would make your baby smarter, happier, sleep better and all kinds of wonderful things. To my knowledge, no research has ever proven or even suggested that, so decide for yourself. Mozart certainly is not going to be bad for your baby but mother’s voice softly crooning to baby is undoubtedly the best!

Why Mozart with babies?

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