Music And Spatial Task Performance Analysis

University of California Irvine researchers Frances Rauscher, Gordon Shaw, and Katherine Ky published a short, one-page article entitled “Music and Spatial Task Performance,” on October 14, 1993 in Nature ((Rauscher, Shawand Ky, 1993). The findings have subsequently proved controversial, but the media frenzy surrounding the article gave birth to the educational phenomenon of the “Mozart Effect”. The article detailed their research which involved exposing college students to ten minutes of Mozart’s Sonata for Two Pianos in D Major (K. 448), a relaxation tape, or silence, then followed by a test on spatial reasoning, taken from the Stanford-Binet intelligence test. The results demonstrated that listening to a Mozart sonata subsequently induced
A subsequent study by the same researchers reconfirmed the initial study and took the analysis a step further. The second trial compared the success of object assembly tasks in a group of three-year-old children who were given music instruction over an eight-month period and those who received no musical training. According to the authors the study of music provided a long-term facilitation and enhancement of nonverbal cognitive abilities in the preschool group (Rausher, Shawand Ky, 1994:3). The investigation advocated a re-evaluation of the role of music in education. Can the study of music enhance the intellectual development of preschool children? In the world of limited funding, should a program for music in education become a permanent feature of the public school curriculum (Rausher, Shawand, Ky 1994:20) ? The domino effect of the second study on the media frenzy and thus the public was overwhelming. Parents anxious to enhance the intellectual capacity of their offspring drove the creation of a cottage industry in everything
The short period of time attributed to the improvement of the cognitive performance of the listeners may be attributed to the general mood-enhancing effect of the music (Wlassoff 2015). Contradicting the theory of a mood effect, Rauscher designed a set of experiments using rats which concluded that musical exposure enhanced spatial abilities in animal models (Rauscher, Robinson and Jens 1998:427). However, other scientists were unable to reproduce these results. Though the Mozart effect has been classified as a myth, the scientific community continues to debate the advocacy of musical training with the goal of providing cognitive benefits. Many agree the benefits of music lessons include fueling creativity, teaching focus and discipline and boosting self-esteem but are in disagreement on the cognitive benefits (Reuell 2013). Studies have further focused on the effects of taking music lessons and music performance on general intelligence, memory, language, and visual-spatial processing (Wlassoff 2015). Sustained long-term musical training tends to produce superior cognitive abilities particularly in subjects like languages and mathematics (Wlassoff