Animal Psychology: Music Hath Charms . . .

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Twelve hours a day for nearly two months, three groups of albino rats at a Texas Tech University laboratory were given some musical entertainment. One group of newborn rat pups was exposed to selections from Mozart—The Magic Flute, Symphonies 40 and 41, the Violin Concerto No. 5. A second group audited an equivalent daily dose of Arnold Schoenberg—Pierrot Lunaire, Verkldrte Nacht and Kol Nidre, among other compositions. The third set of rats, appointed as a control, heard nothing but the whirring of a ventilation fan.

At the end of this calculated bombardment, the three colonies were granted a 15-day respite from all music. Then they entered cages which allowed them, by tripping electric circuits, to opt either for Mozart or Schoenberg —in both cases, compositions they had not heard before—or to listen to nothing but the fan. The results should be encouraging to Mozart buffs. The rats exposed to his music during their compulsory concerts overwhelmingly tuned in on him. The group indoctrinated by Schoenberg split almost evenly between him and Mozart—as did the control group, which was unfamiliar with both composers.

The purpose of this peculiar experiment, which was arranged by Psychologists Henry A. Cross Jr., Charles G. Halcomb and William W. Matter, was not to prove how terrible atonalism is, but to see whether animals that seldom make much noise themselves could respond to the arranged sounds that humans know as music. Cross, who happens to prefer Mozart himself, has an explanation of why the rats agreed with his musical tastes. Schoenberg, the father of serial music, wrote works of extraordinarily complex harmonies and rhythms; in behaviorist jargon, his music is dense with "information bits." Mozart used the traditional chromatic scale and a regular, readily identifiable beat. To a novice listener, and perhaps to a rat as well, Schoenberg may sound too cacophonic. Mozart might appeal to rats by the power of repetition, says Cross, as they gained an appreciative familiarity with his regular and repeated cadences.

Cross's colleague, Halcomb, who is currently bombarding the ears of a creature with a more advanced auditory system, the guinea pig, with assorted sounds, eventually hopes to apply to man what he has learned from his music-loving rats. It may be possible, he argues, that the human infant is susceptible to far more sophisticated instruction than it ordinarily gets during its first months and years. If exposure can teach a baby rat, which to some scientists is not a very reliable creature for experimentation (TIME, Feb. 21), to discriminate between Mozart and Schoenberg, who can say what marvelous stuff can be dinned, just after birth, into the infinitely more malleable human brain?