Plato once said, “Music is a moral law. It gives soul to the universe, wings to the mind, flight to the imagination and charm and gaiety to life and to everything.”

Listening to music can be a powerful emotional experience, and it can be attributed to some amazing changes of the soul. Music has been known to bring tears to the eyes or inflict anger within. Music can empty your mind to make room for thoughts you never knew you had. Music can combine happiness and sorrow into one emotion. Music can inspire and empower.

Music can do a lot of things but is music a quick fix to the problem of intelligence? And I emphasize quick fix because the answer is most definitely no. Howver, there are positive benefits to music listening on cognitive enhancement. Music has the ability to arouse the mind. While the mind is aroused, the capability of performing better on tasks is much higher. In that way music becomes an aid to the mind.

The widespread interest in the potential benefits of listening to music was first sparked by the publication of an article written by Frances Rauscher, Gordon Shaw and Katherine Ky about the Mozart Effect in 1993. Their findings reported superior spatial abilities for people who listened to a recording of music composed by Mozart compared to those who sat in silence or listened to relaxation instructions.

Experiments were conducted thereafter to either prove of disprove the Mozart Effect by psychologists E. Glenn Schellenberg and Patrick G. Hunter of the University of Toronto in Canada and Takayuki Nakata and Sachikoto Tamoto of the Nagasaki Jushin Catholic University in Japan.

In those experiments, psychologists Schellenberg and Hunter found that the 48 Canadian undergraduates they tested performed better on an IQ subtest after listening to an up-tempo piece of music composed by Mozart in comparison to a slow piece by Tomaso Albinoni.

Evidence was found that the effects of music listening extend beyond measures of spatial–temporal ability. The experiment showed that music-enhanced cognitive performance is a byproduct of arousal and mood.

To be clear, there is no special link between listening to Mozart and intellectual abilities. Different genres of music have different mental effects than others; age is also a large contributing factor.

“In some instances, relatively fast-tempo classical music may indeed be more emotionally stimulating for children than slow music or silence, but our results indicate that age appropriate music is more effective in this regard,” Schellenberg and Hunter said in their report.

Another experiment conducted by psychologists Nakata and Tamoto supported that claim, finding that 39 Japanese 5-year-old children drew for longer periods of time after singing or hearing familiar children’s songs than after hearing Mozart or Albinoni, and their drawings were judged by adults to be more creative, energetic and technically proficient.

“The results of the second experiment indicated that the cognitive abilities were enhanced after music listening, and it extends to tests of creativity. Such enhancement depends on the match between the music and the listener,” Nakata and Tamoto stated in their report.

Specifically, Japanese 5-year-old children were asked to make drawings either after listening to classical music or after hearing or singing familiar children’s songs. Each measure of creativity revealed better performance after the familiar songs compared to the classical recordings. In other words, cognitive effects of exposure to music extended to young Asian children and tests of creativity, the report stated.

Though the results of the experiments were different given the genres listened to, this proves that many factors contribute to the effects of music and intelligence. The exposure to different types of music can enhance performance on a variety of cognitive tests — these effects are mediated by changes in emotional state — and the effects are generalized across cultures and age groups.

“Does music make you smarter? The answer is a qualified yes. Music listening can lead to short-term and long-term cognitive benefits, respectively,” Schellenberg concluded in his report.