Mozart for Babies brain development -Classical Music for Babies-Lullabies for Babies

Scientists at the University of California, Irvine initially described the Mozart effect in 1993, and the same team repeated the finding in 1995. College students who listened to a Mozart sonata for a short while before taking a test that assessed their spatial relationship skills performed better than those who took the test after listening to another musician or no music at all, according to the study (which did not examine Mozart's impact on babies).

The impact on the students was brief (15 minutes), and it has always been debatable. Yet, politicians and the media jumped on the Mozart effect bandwagon, saying that the music's many advantages could help with both physical and mental health issues.
The notion that babies would be smarter if they listened to classical music was born out of this hype. One year, the governor of Georgia mandated that a classic music CD — which contained the sonata and other pieces and was donated by Sony — be given to all new babies when they left the hospital.

Despite popular sentiment, the evidence that listening to classical music made anybody smarter was tenuous at best. The lead researcher in the original U.C. Irvine study himself said in a Forbes article that the idea that classical music can cure health problems and make babies smarter has no basis in reality, even though he believes that listening to a Mozart sonata can prime the brain to tackle mathematical tasks.

The researchers at Appalachian State University were unable to duplicate the original "Mozart effect" results and found that the presence or absence of classical music didn't significantly affect student performance on tests. Their results were published in the July 1999 issue of the journal Psychological Science.