You may have heard someone say that classical music makes you smarter and mainstream pop makes you stupid. But is it really true? And how many people genuinely believe that? In my survey, I posed the question: Do you think any genre will make you smarter, and why (or why not) do you think that/those genres will make you smarter?

As you can see from the diagram above, about half of the people who took the survey thought that music could make you smarter. Classical music received the majority of the votes by far, and many people thought jazz could make you smarter. The respondents weren’t very clear about why they thought jazz made people smarter,but the main reason respondents thought that classical music made people smarter was because they had vaguely heard of some research that had shown this. This belief is not without proof. There was in fact research done that led to the phenomenon known as the Mozart effect.

The Mozart effect

A few years ago, a study released showed that  listening to Mozart  improved spatial reasoning (the ability to visualize something). In the study, takers had to listen to Mozart music, relaxation music, and silence for 10 minutes and take a spacial reasoning test after each listening. People generally scored higher on the test after listening to Mozart’s music than the other options. Mozart’s ability to improve spacial reasoning has been referred to as the Mozart effect, and it has been taken that to mean that listening to music, especially classical music, makes you smarter. However, the effects from listening to Mozart disappeared after 10-15 minutes, so from that study you can deduce that just listening to Mozart once isn’t going to make you more intelligent, but it may help you visualize things shortly after listening to it. There were additional studies regarding the Mozart effect involving epilepsi and long-term music studying. If you’re interested, read the study. Otherwise try the Mozart effect yourself, see if it helps:

First try this online spacial reasoning test. Make sure to take note of your score and time. Then listen to the music below, and try the test again, noting your score and time, and compare the results. Was there a difference?:

In a later study, it was shown that a story could work just as well as Mozart. Later on the researchers found that listening to pop music worked just as well as Mozart for improving spacial reasoning. In fact, the children in the study performed better in the spacial reasoning test after they heard the pop music than after they heard Mozart. (Ball 250-251)

A study from 1999 suggested that music improves math skills, because children in a primary school in Los Angeles who learned how to read notes and play the piano improved their maths skills. According to another study, this one in 2003 in Hong Kong , children given musical training have better verbal memory. All these studies point towards what the survey answerers said: Music can help make you smarter in some ways, but you have to do more than listen to Mozart once to become an all-round genius.