If you were to walk across a typical university campus, you would most likely see many students with little white iPod earphones, listening to music. It is nearly impossible to ride public transportation without seeing someone listening to their portable music device. Just about everywhere you go, people listening to music. Music has found its role in just about every aspect of modern life. From television programming to shopping establishments, music has the potential to influence our moods and behaviors (Bruner 94).

Flooding our environment with tunes everywhere, music has the potential to influence our intellectual development. Can particular listening habits increase our intelligence? This question was made famous by a 1993 article in Nature magazine titled “Music and Spatial Task Performance” by university professors Frances Rauscher, Gordon Shaw, and Katherine Ky. They presented research results that suggest that, after listening to Mozart, college students increased their scores on spatial sub-tests in the Stanford-Binet IQ test (611). The spatial sub-tests measure a person’s ability to reason and mentally manipulate shapes and figures. In their research, students listened to about ten minutes of Mozart’s Piano Sonata, and subsequently scored eight to nine IQ points higher on spatial tests taken within ten minutes of music listening. Students did not improve in IQ tests taken later than fifteen minutes after listening to Mozart, nor they did they improve their IQ tests after sitting in silence or listening to relaxation instructions (Hetland 105).
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