In recent decades, an enormous amount of research has been conducted on the specific ways in which sound, rhythm, and music can improve our lives. The results of the research using Mozart's music have been especially stunning and have given rise to the term the Mozart Effect. I use the phrase to encompass such phenomena as the ability of Mozart's music to temporarily heighten spatial awareness and intelligence; its power to improve listeners' concentration and speech abilities; its tendency to advance the jump in reading and language skills among children who receive regular music instruction; and the startling increase in SAT scores among students who sing or play an instrument. But the Mozart Effect refers to more than just raising children's test scores.

By learning to recognize and consciously implement the Mozart Effect in your child's life, you can:

• Begin to communicate and connect with him even before he is born.
• Stimulate brain growth in the womb and throughout early childhood.
• Positively affect his emotional perceptions and attitudes from prebirth onward.
• Provide patterns of sound on which he can build his understanding of the physical world.
• Reduce his level of emotional stress or physical pain, even in infancy.
• Enhance his motor development, including the grace and ease with which he learns to crawl, walk, skip, and run.
• Improve his language ability, including vocabulary, expressiveness, and ease of communication.
• Introduce him to a wider world of emotional expression, creativity, and aesthetic beauty.
• Enhance his social abilities.
• Improve his reading, writing, mathematical, and other academic skills, as well as his ability to remember and to memorize.
• Introduce him to the joys of community.
• Help him create a strong sense of his own identity.

It is amazing to think that music and rhythmic verbal sounds, which have been available to us throughout our lives, can have such a powerful effect on the mind and body. Yet the evidence is indisputable. There's far more to good music than meets the ear. Wisely used, it can create a healthy and stimulating sound world for your family and profoundly enhance your child's growth.