Mozart Effect, History of
The concept of the "Mozart effect" was described by French researcher Dr. Alfred Tomatis in his book "Pourquoi Mozart?" 1991, which explored the broad applicability of Mozart in particular in achieving results in Tomatis' thirty years of work with primarily learning disabled children. The phrase first came to US media attention in a 1993 paper by Frances H. Rauscher, a psychologist at the University of Wisconsin, and Gordon Shaw, a physicist at the University of California at Irvine, in a series of papers. The first paper, published in 1993 reported that brief exposure to a Mozart piano sonata produces a temporary increase in spatial reasoning scores, amounting to the equivalent of 8�9 IQ points on the Stanford�Binet IQ scale. The fact that IQ was mentioned at all, and the fact that the music used in the study was by Mozart, the epitome of high-art music in the educated European tradition, had an obvious appeal to those who value this music, and the "Mozart effect" was widely reported.
New York Times music columnist Alex Ross wrote in 1994, in a light-hearted article, "researchers [Rauscher and Shaw] have determined that listening to Mozart actually makes you smarter," and presented this as the final piece of evidence that Mozart has dethroned Beethoven as "the world's greatest composer."
A 1997 Boston Globe article mentioned some of the Rauscher and Shaw results. It described one study in which three- and four-year-olds who were given six months of private piano lessons scored 34 percent higher on tests of spatio-temporal reasoning than control groups given computer lessons, singing lessons, and no training.
The popular impact of the theory was demonstrated on January 13, 1998, when Zell Miller, governor of Georgia, announced that his proposed state budget would include $105,000 a year to provide every child born in Georgia with a tape or CD of classical music. Miller stated "No one questions that listening to music at a very early age affects the spatial-temporal reasoning that underlies math and engineering and even chess."
Source: Wikipedia.org