I’m not sure what a “savage breast” is, but I’d be willing to bet that music can soothe it. I doubt that it can do much about the hardness of rocks, but I wouldn’t rule out an effect on vegetation. Of course I’m referring to a 300-year-old quote by British playwright William Congreve, which in its entirety reads “Music has charms to soothe a savage breast, / To soften rocks, or bend a knotted oak.” Yes, the correct quote is “breast,” not “beast,” although the latter misquote is probably more common than the original. And savage beasts probably can be soothed by music.
Cows, except for some mad ones, may not exactly be savage beasts, but it seems they are affected by music. A herd in Indiana increased its milk production by more than 5 percent when a Beethoven symphony was piped into the barn. Country music had no effect, but when heavy metal was played, the animals didn’t even want to enter their stalls. And when they did, they were not interested in giving milk. Production decreased by 6 percent. I don’t know of any oak trees that have been bent by music, but back in the 1970s Dorothy Retallack made it onto the CBS evening news with her research about the musical tastes of plants. Petunias apparently leaned toward a tape player in response to Ravi Shankar’s sitar music but attempted to escape when rock and roll was played. An Illinois botanist even found that corn grew taller when exposed to Gershwin’s “Rhapsody in Blue.” I wonder if it would grow as tall as an elephant’s eye if it listened to “Oklahoma.”
Now let’s get down to the kind of savage beasts—and breasts, I suppose—that interest us the most. Those of the human variety. There is no doubt that we are soothed by music. If you have to undergo a colonoscopy, according to recent research, you’ll be less apprehensive and more cooperative if you can listen to your favorite music. Even the doctor may perform better. When surgeons were given the task of counting backward, subtracting the number thirteen each time, they had a lower pulse rate and lower blood pressure and did the arithmetic faster when listening to music. Japanese researchers have shown that levels of cortisol, a stress hormone, decrease in response to music, but testosterone levels show a gender bias. In men, music seems to lower testosterone, but it increases it in women. So, after dinner, gentlemen may want to queue up Ravel’s “Bolero” for their partner while they leave the room to do the dishes. They can then come back for dessert and put on a Mozart sonata. Studies have shown that fewer calories are consumed when such soothing arrangements are played.
Ah, those Mozart sonatas! They can do more than cut down on calories. That’s what Gordon Shaw, a physicist, and Frances Rauscher, an expert in cognitive development, at the University of California found back in 1993, when they designed an experiment to study the effect of Mozart’s music on the brain. Rauscher was a former concert cellist who realized that music could change people’s moods and wondered if it could alter their thought processes as well. Three dozen students were asked to listen to the first ten minutes of Mozart’s “Sonata for Two Pianos in D Major” before being given a paper folding and cutting test. The students who listened to Mozart performed better than the ones who took the test after listening to a relaxation tape or after a period of silence. These results captured the imagination of the lay press and spawned an industry. Articles appeared about IQs being increased after listening to Mozart, diseases being cured, and children’s ability to reason being increased. None of these was supported by solid research. In fact, nobody has been able to duplicate the original work of Shaw and Rauscher. Critics suggested that music improves mood and that nobody should be surprised that people in a good mood perform better on certain tests. In response to a study that seemed to show that kids who took music lessons had higher IQs, the critics maintained that it was probably due to the fact that well-educated parents are more likely to send children for lessons, and children from such parents are more likely to have higher IQs, partly due to heredity.
But now it seems the critics may have been a bit too critical. Rauscher and Hing Hua Li, a geneticist at Stanford University, have come up with some new findings. They had rats listen either to Mozart, or to “white noise.” The Mozarted rats performed better in solving a maze, and more interestingly, showed anatomical changes in their brains. They produced more compounds that are known to forge connections between nerve cells, connections critical to enhanced brain activity. It seems that musical stimulation really may have measurable neurochemical effects. Some researchers even suggest that Mozart’s compositions may have a special quality that mimics the rhythmic cycles in the human brain. Preliminary research does indeed show that Alzheimer’s patients perform better on some spatial tests after listening to a Mozart sonata, and that premature babies can be soothed by such music. Unborn babies have been seen to “dance” in the womb in response to Mozart’s compositions. And now researchers at the University of Hong Kong have shown that children who receive musical training do better on verbal memory tests.
Personally, I’d like to see some research on how Broadway tunes affect us. For me, listening to Andrew Lloyd Webber’s “Music of the Night” or “Love Changes Everything” is positively therapeutic. Albert Schweitzer, I think, would have agreed: “There are two means of refuge from the miseries of life: music and cats,” the famed doctor maintained. The music, I’ll buy; the cats, I’m less sure about. Unless one of them sings “Memory” on a Broadway stage.