I have a clipping from the Richmond Times-Dispatch, July 28, 1997. It talks about an experiment conducted by David Merrell. His experiment was to observe the effects of music on mice. There were three groups: the Mozart mice, the hard rock mice, and a control group that listened to no music at all. His tests ran for three weeks.

At the end of the experiment, the control group had cut its navigation time in half. The Mozart mice did even better, cutting their time by 8½ minutes. But the hard rock group did much worse — taking 30 minutes to complete the maze, bumping into walls, staggering aimlessly about.

It gets worse: This is the second time Merrell tried the experiment. The first time, “I had to cut my project short because all the hard rock mice killed each other. None of the classical mice did that at all.” This time he kept the mice separate.

The same experiment is now mentioned on various websites. You can read a summary, “About Mice and Music“; and there is a longer explanation of the experiments over at The Schiller Institute.

A critic might say, “True, but people are not mice.” And so it is. But neither are mice fans of Mozart. How do we explain the mice’s increased performance with the classical music? At the least, the experiment suggests that music may affect brain functions of animals. And if that is so, it probably affects our own as well.

At a broader level, it suggests to me (and to others) that the civilization associated with classical music, and the hedonism and sociopathic behavior associated with the more aggressive forms of pop, are not cultural coincidences. In music history, the correlation between music forms, music purposes, and culture are striking. (As the Richmond Times-Dispatch article says in closing, “Who ever heard of a classical pianist choking to death on his own vomit?”) At some level music seems to influence and/or reflect mental and emotional states, and behavior, each type of music relating to a special group of thoughts and feelings.