What one observes in Mozart is a feel of brilliance and gaiety on its surface; as you explore it deeply, you are certain to arrive at a tinge of melancholy. This ambivalence, continually fascinating and provocative, can especially be noticed in his Cosi fan tutte.
`Mozart is music’ is a common saying in the music world. An Austrian musical prodigy, Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart was a composer, key-board player, violinist, violist and conductor. He had made deep inroads into the Western musical world and left his indelible footprints through his work. Though he died prematurely at the young age of 35, in the year 1791, in recent years, his musical compositions have been studied by a team of researchers: physicians, psychologists and neurologists who have discovered that his music exhibits a definite therapeutic impact on its listeners!
What one observes in Mozart is a feel of brilliance and gaiety on its surface; as you explore it deeply, you are certain to arrive at a tinge of melancholy. This ambivalence, continually fascinating and provocative, can especially be noticed in his Cosi fan tutte.
The Mozart Effect
It is widely acknowledged now that some forms of music are more healing than the other and that Mozart’s remains at the top. Alfred Tomatis, a French physician, who spent almost five decades studying the healing and creative effects of music, had conducted clinical studies over 100,000 patients (particularly with listening inabilities, vocal and auditory handicaps as well as learning deficiencies) has now confirmed what is called the Mozart effect. The child prodigy Mozart’s sonatas and concertos were found to have healing effects in innumerable experiments conducted by his team around the globe. Tomatis found that regardless of a listener’s taste or previous exposure to this composer, the music calmed the listener, improved spatial perception and enabled them to express themselves lucidly.
The High Frequencies that Heal…
Tomatis noticed that the first organ that develops in the foetus is the ear and its cochlea, the spiral cavity of the ear. ( It is another matter that Garuda Purana, an ancient treatise in India, had observed this long before acoustics came to be known in Europe, as it states that the first faculty to enter into the embryo and the last one to leave the body when dead, is the faculty of hearing!) Tomatis found that various frequencies of sound have an association with different regions of our body: the lower frequencies associated with legs and lower parts of the body, while the higher frequencies — as we come across in Mozart’s compositions affect the mind or the brain. It was Tomatis who, using the high frequency music of Mozart, could virtually turn into a non-entity actor struggling to express himself into a super-star of French cinema, with a mellifluous voice! Tomatis traced the cause of the actor’s voice and memory problem to deeper emotional levels and the treatment for this was simple but effective: Listening to Mozart a couple of hours every day. Eventually, the actor came to be a celebrity for his mellifluous voice! Yes, this was the story of Gerard Depardieu, a French counterpart of Amitabh Bachchan.
Subsequent research carried out on school and college students listening to or playing Mozart for at least half-an-hour a day have an edge over others as they are able to perform better on spatial-temporal tests, e.g., pattern-matching.
Music and IQ
36 students took a standard intelligence test after listening to either silence, a relaxing guided imagery tape or Mozart. After the period of silence, the average score was 110. This was 111, after the period of guided imagery tape. The score was significantly higher after listening to Mozart: 119. It is indeed, strange to note that even the people who had expressed their dislike for Baroque and classical music had scored high in all these tests! It was concluded by Frances Rauscher, who conducted this study that listening to complex, non-repetitive music like that of Mozart may stimulate neural pathways, which are essential for the process of thinking. Rauscher also used the same experimental designs to study other genres of music such as Philip Glass and other highly rhythmic dance pieces. She, however, noticed no increase in the listener’s IQ level.
Spatial Intelligence and Spatial Reasoning
Spatial intelligence, which is crucial in higher brain functions like chess, mathematics, music etc. is the ability to see the visual world accurately, to form mental images of the physical objects and to recognize variations in objects. There are reports that listening to Mozart increases spatial scores of high school and college-level students on IQ tests. Researchers at University of California at Irvine have concluded that simply listening to the classical music of Mozart can enhance spatial reasoning performance. In yet another study, spatial intelligence was tested by projecting sixteen abstract figures similar to folded pieces of paper on an overhead screen for one minute. The exercises tested whether 79 could tell what the shapes would look like when they were unfolded. Over 5 days, one group listened to silence, another to Mozart and the third to the mixed sounds. The studies revealed that while all the groups improved their scores from day one to day two, the Mozart group was “significant as its score rose 62%, compared to 14% for the silent group and 11% for the mixed sound group. The Mozart group continued to achieve the subsequent days as well.
In another study conducted by Frances Rauscher, it was also found that the spatial reasoning performance of 19 kindergarten children — who received 8 months of music lessons — far exceeded that of 15 others who were never given any music lesson.
Therefore all pre-school children should get adequate music singing, playing the instruments, listening etc. which would, no doubt go a long way in developing their mental capacity as they grow up into adulthood.
Other Musical Experiments.
Various other people —not necessarily physicians or scientists have also experimented with Mozart music. The city of Edmonton — in Alberta, Canada — for example, had been playing Mozart’s string quartet in the town squares. Besides calming the pedestrians, the officials have found a noticeable reduction in drug dealings.
The Department of immigration and Naturalization in the U.S. has also played Mozart during the English language classes conducted to the foreign immigrants arriving in the U.S. The officials have observed that by mixing Mozart with the lessons, the immigrants’ capacity to retain the new words have gone up tremendously. It is on record that some monks in the British monasteries have noticed the impact of Mozart on the yield of milk. The cows, fed not only with fodder, but also with Mozart have shown a significantly higher yield.
The Secret of Mozart’s Music
Several theories exist to explain the Mozart effect, and we will just examine a handful of them here.
Gordon Shaw, a theoretical physicist, is of the view that Mozart’s music warms up the brain. He suspects that complex music facilitates certain complex neuronal patterns involved in high brain functions and which facilitate a person in solving problems faced in say, mathematics, chess etc. David Sobel, a psycho-neuro-immunologist, suspects that at least part of the thrill of music seems to come from the release of endorphins, the powerful opiate-like chemical produced in the brain that induces euphoria and relieves pain. Thanks to the grand strides made in neuro-imaging in recent years, it is now well-acknowledged that sedative music reduces the level of stress hormones, such as adrenaline, significantly which results in calming down the limbic system of the brain, which plays a key role in emotion.
Feed the Children with Music!
Music remains no longer magic. Science has endorsed its role in recent years. Thanks to the giant strides made in brain research, which were possible with the arrival of neuro-imaging techniques, music is no longer a grandma’s tale! The new branches of science that have emerged in recent years with a great deal of scientific research done in a multiplicity of disciplines viz., neurology, psychology, immunology, clinical medicine etc have proved beyond doubt the importance of music as a health-giver and a health sustainer. It is high time that our tension-prone schooling system is blended with a syllabus of music, encouraging singing and playing musical instruments. Scientifically proven musical forms of high frequencies such as Mozart and other Baroque music, New Age music and the Eastern music — which includes our own Indian system of ragas – are vital for the mental growth of our children. A daily intake of music is, therefore, a must!
This article was Published in Ayurveda and All – May 2010 – Pages 35 to 37
Also Published in Alive – March 2004
Edited by Geeta Shreedar, August 5, 2021