Mozart effect Orange Book

In this set of materials, both the article and the listening speculate about the Mozart´s effect. The Mozart´s effect is said to be a positive effect in cognitive ability due to listening to classic music. However, while the former indicates the experiments that have been made to explain the benefits of classic music, the lecturer doubts on the researchers´ conclusions about them.

According to the reading passage, there is a currently interest in the advantages that classic music could offer mostly to students. That´s why some researchers decided to demonstrate these benefits through some experiments. The first experiment claimed to report if there was a difference in cognitive ability after the students had been listening to Mozart´s Sonata, relaxation tapes or be in silence. This experiment concluded that those students who had listened to Mozart´s Sonata got better results. The second experiment did by the same researches tested cognitive ability by diving students in four groups: some took piano classes, others singing lessons or computer training and some of them didn´t take any class. In order to conclude the advantages of listening to Mozarrt´s music the researchers tested the spatial reasoning of all of the students. The results showed that those students who had taken piano lesson got better scores in spatial reasoning.

Nevertheless, the lecturer is skeptical about the conclusions that experts have made about Mozart effect, as she considers that there is not enough and strong evidence to support any of them. In order to explain her opinion, the lecturer explained three aspects in which she thought researchers are wrong about Mozart´s effect. The first reason is that the experiments have been made by the same researchers and therefore she believes that more different researchers should take part in this research to demonstrate the supposed benefits. Nowadays not all schools teach music and art to students and owing to this fact, students who want to study music should take classes outside school. From the lecturer´s point of view, in spite of these facts, there are no strong conclusions in order to re-installed music classes in school. Finally, the lecturer discuss about the products such as audio tapes that have been made because Mozart´s effect. She totally disagrees with these type of products because there is not enough information not only to prove Mozart´s effect but also to understand how human brain works.

To summarize, both the reading and the lecture focus on the possible positive effects of classic music in cognitive ability. On the one hand, the reading passage describes the basics of the Mozart effect and the interpretations that support each of it. On the other hand, the lecturer casts doubts on these conclusions because she considers that more research is necessary to understand if Mozart´s effect really exists or does not.