DarkRoomSite - Epic Rock, Piano, Guitar, Xylophone Instruments

"The Mozart Effect is an example of how science and the media mix in our world. A suggestion in a few paragraphs in a scientific journal becomes a universal truth in a matter of months, eventually believed even by the scientists who initially recognized how their work had been distorted and exaggerated by the media. Others, smelling the money, jump on the bandwagon and play to the crowd, adding their own myths, questionable claims, and distortions to the mix."

"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. One researcher commented that the "very best thing that could be said of their [Shaw's and Rauscher's] experiment-were it completely uncontested-would be that listening to bad Mozart enhances short-term IQ" (Linton). Rauscher has moved on to study the effects of Mozart on rats. Both Shaw and Rauscher have speculated that exposure to Mozart enhances spatial-reasoning and memory in humans. "

Note that the only scientific tests were performed on college students.