music

Some experiments on music and humans.

Dr. Racher, a behavioral scientist, did some experiemtns on college students. She teaches at the Universtiy of CA Irvine. She tested the students with a spacial temporal iq test. This test was with no music. Next for one group, she played Mozart for 10 minutes before the test, another she played 'relaxation' music, and for the third, she played no music. The ones listening to Mozart preformed 8-10 IQ points higher than the other two groups on average.

Dr. Raucher did another experiment, this one with preschoolers. Bear with me, it doesn't exactly have to do with music, as in rock being bad, just a sort of general thing that I find rather interesting. Dr. Raucher took four different groups of preschoolers, and gave them 20 minutes of suplemental activities daily, for six months. Now, the adult to student ration was the same, classroom space, time, etc. everything was closely measured. The four subjects were these: free play, singing, computer (I'm not sure what you do with a preschooler on the computer, but anyways...), and piano. Before the six months, she gave them a spacial temporal IQ test (scaled down for preschoolers. It's like say you have a camel, then you cut it into four sections. They had to piece the four sections together.). At the end of the six months, they had all improved, but of course, that would be expected, because they were growing anyways. But, amazingly, the ones doing piano improved 46% more than the others did.

Another experiment was done to see if there was any measurable effect on human emotions from music. There were four groups, classical, new age, grunge rock, and designer music (this was sort of the point of the experiment... to see if you could manufacture music that would have desirable effects). Tests were admistered, testing for mental clarity, caring, relaxation, and vigor; hostility, fatigue, sadness, and tension.

classical: slightly increased the four positives and decreased four negatives.

new age: increased relaxation fatigue and sadness, decreased hostility

designer: increased four positives, decreased four negatives

grunge rock: significantly increased four negatives and decreased four positives