MOZART AND MEMORY - The Effect of Mozart on Short-Term Memory Rhiannon Evans (Year 10) Science Faculty, The Illawarra Grammar School, Western Avenue, Mangerton, 2500 Abstract “Mozart makes you smarter”. But does it help a person remember? Listening to the complex music of Mozart can improve a person’s intelligence quotient or IQ score temporarily. However, some music, particularly unfamiliar music, can inhibit short-term memory performance. In this experiment, females aged 15-16 completed the University of Washington short-term memory test either in silence or with Mozart’s Piano Sonata No. 11 in A Major playing to test whether listening to Mozart effects short-term memory in people who do not study music. Those who were familiar with Mozart or studied music completed the test in silence while those who did not meet these criteria completed the test with sound. The study found that listening to Mozart negatively effects short-term memory.
Introduction ‘The Mozart Effect’ refers to the theory that listening to Mozart’s music can temporarily improve IQ scores (Swartz, n.d.) and has been proven true for spatial-temporal tasks. Test participants that listen to Mozart while completing spatial-temporal tasks showed significantly higher results than those who do not (Kliewer, 1999). However, there have been conflicted outcomes and results regarding the effect of music on memory (Musliu et al. 2017). Listening to both familiar and unfamiliar music triggers the part of the brain associated with memory, but different genres have varying effects on performance that have not yet been determined. For people who study music, listening to familiar music negatively effects concentration and memory because the part of the brain that is engaged to analyse the music is also the same part used to complete the tasks (Mori et al., n.d.) and it can be assumed that unfamiliar music would have a similar effect. In contrast, people who do not study music do not experience such effects with
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This experiment aimed to investigate the effect of Mozart on the short-term memory of people who do not study music, an area of study not commonly addressed. It is predicted that Mozart will have no effect on short-term memory performance. Method Six participants were questioned on their familiarity with Mozart’s music and assigned a condition according to their response. Those who were familiar with Mozart’s music completed the test in silence and those unfamiliar with Mozart’s music completed the test with Mozart’s Piano Sonata No. 11 in A Major playing. Every test participant wore headphones for the duration of the test. Participants completed the University of Washington short-term memory test which asked them to memorise the letters that appear on the screen for three seconds and write down as many as they could remember when they disappeared, a process that was repeated six times. The results were converted to a percentage and the average calculated to 25
