preview

Effects Of Listening On Mozart 's Music

Good Essays

Countless studies have proven time and time again that a student’s performance in school is greatly increased when they learn to play an instrument. The studies discuss the “Mozart Effect,” which says that listening to Mozart’s music can increase a child’s ability for spatial reasoning, as well as help brain development. The studies also cite the fact that many of history’s most intelligent men, like Albert Einstein and Benjamin Franklin, played one or more musical instruments. These studies are wrong. Students should not be required to learn an instrument, because it does not help them perform better in school. This fact was proven by a study done by Harvard researchers. The study was relatively simple. The researchers gathered together 29 parents and their four year olds. The children were then asked to complete a vocabulary test. After the test was completed, the children were randomly split up into two separate groups. One group was designated to take music lessons for a year, while the other took visual art lessons for a year. When the year was up, the children were tested on cognition, vocabulary, math, and spatial tasks. These tests were chosen because they are more representative of intelligence than a simple IQ test. The students who had taken music lessons for a year performed almost identically to the students who had not taken any music lessons. The only difference was that some of the music-lesson students performed marginally better on one of the spatial

Get Access