SOUND The Mozart Effect Mozart has a new hangout. No longer relegated to the dusty stereos of classical-music buffs, he can now be heard drowning out the sounds of crying babies and squealing Teletubbies at the local nursery, or blasting from high-end toys and crib mobiles. Why has Mozart become so popular with the under-five set? The reason traces back to the startling results of a 1993 experiment performed by Frances Rauscher, Gordon Shaw, and Katherine Ky at the University of California, Irvine. In the experiment, thirty-six college students each tried to solve three sets of spatial-reasoning tasks. A typical task consisted of imagining a piece of paper folded and cut in various ways, and then figuring out what the paper would look like unfolded. Before starting each new task, the subjects sat through a different ten-minute “listening condition.” Before the first task they heard Mozart’s Sonata for Two Pianos in D Major, K. 448; before the second one, a blood-pressure-lowering relaxation tape; and prior to the third, silence.
