Listening to Mozart doesn't make babies smarter. The study never claimed it did.
A 1993 study found that students did slightly better on a paper-folding puzzle for about 15 minutes after hearing a Mozart sonata. The press turned that into 'Mozart makes you smart', and a US governor proposed classical CDs for every newborn. Later research found little evidence for any special Mozart effect.
In 1993 Frances Rauscher, Gordon Shaw and Catherine Ky published a short paper in Nature. Thirty-six college students listened to Mozart's Sonata for Two Pianos in D major, K. 448, or to relaxation instructions, or to silence, and then took spatial-reasoning tasks from an IQ test, such as imagining how folded and cut paper would look. After the Mozart, scores rose a little, but the boost faded within about 15 minutes. General intelligence was never measured.
Popular retellings leapt far beyond that. A newspaper columnist wrote that Mozart 'actually makes you smarter', the claim drifted from students to infants, and Don Campbell's 1997 book The Mozart Effect launched a line of products. In January 1998 Zell Miller, governor of Georgia, proposed spending $105,000 a year to give every newborn in the state a classical music tape or CD, playing legislators some Beethoven and asking whether they felt smarter already.
Then came the replications. In 1999 a meta-analysis by Chabris concluded that any gain was small and limited to one kind of task, best explained by 'enjoyment arousal': people do a bit better when they are in a good, alert mood. One study found that a Stephen King story worked as well as Mozart for listeners who enjoyed it, and the effect vanished when the Mozart was slowed down and shifted into minor chords. A 2010 meta-analysis of 39 studies found little support, and noted that studies linked to the original researchers reported much larger effects than others.
Rauscher herself has stressed that listening to Mozart does not raise general intelligence. The weight of evidence suggests that playing Mozart to a baby is best done for the pleasure of it.
Source: Wikipedia — Mozart effect · Text summarised from Wikipedia (CC BY-SA 4.0)
