New research: Mozart reduces epileptic fits. Haydn’s worse than useless
mainCzech researchers from Brno have reported the results of a controlled study of playing Mozart and Haydn to patients with epilepsy.
Presenting on 19 June 2021 at the 7th Congress of the European Academy of Neurology, the team found that listening to Mozart’s Sonata For Two Pianos in D major K. 488 reduced epileptiform discharges (EDs) in 18 patients.
However, said Professor Ivan Rektor: ‘To our surprise, there were significant differences between the effects of listening to Mozart’s K448 and Haydn’s No. 94. Listening to Mozart led to a 32% decrease in EDs but listening to Haydn’s No. 94 caused a 45% increase.’
Unfortunately it’s the performers’ fault, as always. He’s probably the one who suffers the most from bad performers. When played properly and with passion, Haydn’s music shines with all its divine might.
That’s funny, I guess the participants couldn’t handle the Paukenschlag. Maybe Haydn should come with an epilepsy warning.
In a weird way this confirms how I think about the composers: Haydn dares abrupt and unexpected things; Mozart tends to musically weave everything together quite neatly.
Now this is a truly musical explanation.
Indeed and how rare it is in these pages.
I have read that certain video games also are thought to trigger epileptic fits — something about the barrage of changing images and colors and sounds. Following Matthias’s suggestion, I suppose one could describe this particular Mozart Sonata as music of pattern and order, and this particular Haydn symphony as joke-laden and setting up destruction of carefully crafted expectations.
The sample does seem too small to draw conclusions from.
And one can find works by Mozart and Haydn that reverse those stereotypes – perhaps those pieces should be used on a control group.
Interesting but problematic: They should have compared works of a same genre- A Haydn vs a Mozart symphony or two piano sonatas. If a good “surprise” emerges in the second movement of the Haydn – no wonder a suseptible patient might get a convulsion.
“Haydn’s worse than useless”. Well, as a therapy for epilepsy, perhaps.
I always suspected Haydn of protoepilepticism. He builds all kinds of surprises in his phrasing which gives the pattern-seeking brain waves a jolt. One does not need to suffer from epilepsi to be unpleasantly surprised by such irregularities. and we know of perfectly healthy, well-balanced people who have to be carried-out of the hall on a stretcher and into an asylum after attending a Xenakis performance. Music has influence.
Schoenberg said, after the first performance of his 12-tone opera ‘Von Heute auf Morgen’: ‘These sounds greatly depress me’. All the more remarkable that the opera was supposed to be a humorous one.
Dodgy methodology – could the results also be due to comparing a piano duet with an orchestra?
I can’t imagine what possible value there is in this study, assuming it’s not some sort of rather puerile medical joke . The Mozart is relatively simple and straightforward music, whereas the Haydn , being orchestral, is much more complex, and in any event if they played the “surprise” movement , it’s hardly a shock to find that the brainwaves on an EEG were rather disturbed at the relevant point
Looking in vain for the words “peer reviewed”, or some indication that the results were replicated elsewhere. It is rather like the articles touting the efficacy of hydroxychloroquine in treating COVID. Maybe this site should be renamed “Slipped Disc and Junk Science”.
Such as these?
https://c19hcq.com/
Please educate yourself.
No. More like this: https://jamanetwork.com/journals/jamanetworkopen/fullarticle/2779044
and this: https://www.nature.com/articles/s41467-021-22446-z
Let me take a wild guess, Mr. Hayne. You think the election was stolen, don’t you?
The most common treatment for covid19 is hydroxycholoroquine + azithromycin. My fault for not stating that. I assumed most people knew that. The first study has hydroxychloroquine without azithromycin. That’s odd.
The second is a meta-analysis of 28 trials (14 unpublished, 9 publications and 5 preprints).
I don’t know how many were peer reviewed.
The studies I showed were 312 studies, 230 peer reviewed, 260 comparing treatment and control groups. I’m sorry but the evidence is overwhelming for its efficacy (I won’t go into Ivermectin also).
Here’s an article on the pseudo-science behind the assault on hydroxychloroquine.
https://wattsupwiththat.com/2020/05/02/pseudo-science-behind-the-assault-on-hydroxychloroquine/
Here’s another on The “Deadly” Hydroxychloroquine Publishing Scandal. How the world’s top medical journals were cynically exploited by Big Pharma
https://off-guardian.org/2020/06/23/the-deadly-hydroxychloroquine-publishing-scandal/
Here’s noted right wing talk show host Bill Maher on big tech censorship which he also brings up Ivermectin…
https://twitter.com/BrentHBaker/status/1408629985351454725
Mr. Rami, I wish you would stop pushing conspiracy theories. Leave that for the media.
They’re the professionals.
As for your non sequitur question if I think the election was stolen…it’s a trick question right?:)
“The most common treatment for covid19 is hydroxycholoroquine + azithromycin. My fault for not stating that. I assumed most people knew that.”
No, that’s just your weird bubble you live in. 🙂
“There was no apparent benefit associated with HCQ receipt, alone or in combination with azithromycin, and an increased risk of intubation when used in combination with azithromycin [Hazard Ratio (95% Confidence Interval): 1.55 (1.07, 2.24)].”
https://academic.oup.com/aje/advance-article/doi/10.1093/aje/kwab183/6308675
But sure, let’s call it a win! Hmm, where did I hear that one before. 😉
This study was done on patients admitted to hospitals which is stage 3.
There are 3 stages to covid19.
Early infection is first stage
pulmonary phase is second stage
hyperinflammatory phase is stage 3 where patients are admitted to hospitals
Hydroxychloroquine has its best effectiveness in the early stages. This has been proved over and over.
So why was study published trying to show its ineffectiveness? I’ll let you figure it out. Try looking at ANY of the hundreds of studies showing its efficacy not just trying to “get” me. These are people’s lives were talking about.
“Please educate yourself.”
“I assumed most people knew that.”
“I’ll let you figure it out.”
Увидимся, русский тролль. 😉
And if we cannot trust some random fishy website, whom can we trust?!
How do you even find this stuff? 😀
“Mozart is better than Haydn” for the purpose of reducing epileptiform discharges, these scientists say. But why did they not compare the Mozart keyboard piece to a keyboard piece by Haydn rather than to a symphony by that composer? As they themselves state, timbre as well as rhythm and harmony are of importance. And, by the by, they do report that the Haydn symphony was beneficial for representatives of half the human race–women–though it is not stated in the journalistic summary exactly how beneficial.
My fly on the wall tells me that the reason women find listening to Haydn more satisfactory, is that it strongly confirms the legitimacy of their wishes in love making, namely: inventive, creative surprises, and not the routine treatment they often receive.
As the bartender said to the minister, priest and rabbi who came in together, “is this some kind of a joke?” How can you compare, for their soothing qualities, a piano piece with a symphony, especially one with a sudden blast of sound when one (the uninitiated) is least expecting it?
As there’s a big and loud surprise in no. 94, that’s hardly surprising. Perhaps they should have used the Farewell.
Silly headline. One piece by each composer, 18 patients. This is what is called an “exploratory” study. That means it is not projectible.
My first reaction was ‘well done NL – a brilliant piece of micturational theft; a welcome nugget of light relief among the serious diatribes elsewhere in SD’ – but my research has shown that both the European Academy of Neurology and Professor Rektor do exist and this is not a spoof!
So a few academics in the Czech Republic have proved that hearing one work reduces the incidence of epileptic seizures and another increases it. Their research was carried out on 18 patients and thus merited being posted on SD for serious discussion – and being presented at the 7th Congress of the European Academy of Neurology.
I guess that almost 100 per cent of epilepsy patients drink water – so surely that’s the culprit! Have they tried the same tests on 625 other groups of 18 patients to find out which Koechel numbered works or genres were best at reducing the number of attacks and which ones exacerbated them?
There appears to have been some confusion in the above identification of the Mozart work – the magnificent, majestic two-piano sonata in D major with miraculous curative properties is initially referred to as K488, which is the wonderful A major piano concerto no. 23. The two-piano sonata is K448, as correctly identified in the third paragraph.
‘To our surprise, there were significant differences between the effects of listening to Mozart’s K448 and Haydn’s No. 94’ it says, with the latter work increasing the incidence of epileptiform discharges. Unfortunately the researchers did not identify the precise point in the Haydn symphony where these discharges occurred. Could it be that this happened, engendering their surprise, at about 34 seconds into the second movement?
Much has been written on SD recently about the woke claptrap spewed out by pseudo-academics – this is non-woke claptrap, admittedly, but it leads to the same question. Who paid them to do this research? University academics are cloistered in monastic isolation, socially distanced from the real world but paid to instil their surreal elysian dreamscapes and Utopian abstractions into their students. The academics’ work is peer-reviewed of course and receives the highest plaudits – but it would do, wouldn’t it? The process is eloquently elucidated in Mahler’s song ‘Lob des hohen Verstandes’.
Their flock get their degrees and then discover the real world, where they have to earn their livings through working, pay taxes and possibly raise families – and then realise that their erstwhile abstract musings in the shady groves of academe are of no practical use whatsoever.
I love “micturitional theft ” , Herbie !
Thanks Christopher!
The reference to K488 in the first paragraph is an error. Should be K448.
Are there any statistics available for the Second Viennese School composers?
Yes, alas.
And they are terrible.
Schoenberg’s Wind Quintet causes nervous tics, spells of dizziness, and disruption of motoric coordination.
Berg’s Wozzeck, if well-performed, may cause clinical depression; statistics have revealed that for every performance there are an average of 3 1/2 suicides. It must be admitted that mostly the victims had already been under treatment and been sent to the performance in the context of a behavioral therapy, i.e. exposure to the irritant would invoke a healthy counter-reaction.
(The ‘half suicide’ relates to the second half of the eventually successful attempt, which had begun before the performance.)
The side effects of Webern’s Symphony lead, in 67% of the listeners of one single performance, to gastric deregulation with severe flatulence as a result, spoiling the concert experience for the other 33% of the audience.
It may be of some interest to know that a hospital in Toronto has named a newly discovered disease to Boulez’ ‘Multiple Eclats’: uncontrolled screaming and weeping for no reason whatsoever.
play them John Cage, Boulez et al, the study shows 45 patients jumped out the window.
Two years ago I heard that after a performance of a piece by Claude Bolling twenty patients pushed three doctors and twenty patients out the window.
Treat a patient to a Claude Bolling piece, and he’ll have a treat for a day.
Shove a patient out of the window, and he’ll be flying for the rest of his life.
All a matter of relative perspective.
Right.
Not controlled enough, IMO. If they really wanted a properly controlled experiment of Mozart vs. Haydn, they should have chosen two works for the same medium (e.g. two symphonies, preferably as recorded by the same orchestra) Otherwise, who’s to tell that the result wasn’t due to the impact of two pianos vs. that of an orchestra?
Shivkumar Sharma and Pandit Jasraj are two giants of Hindustani music who have expressed interest in the beneficial healing properties of music.
http://www.azuremilesrecords.com/spiritualhighshivkumarsharmainterview.html
http://www.azuremilesrecords.com/ahirbhairavsnowleopard.html
One would need to know the statistical significance of the results to draw any conclusion whatsoever. However, it’s easy to blame the surprise in No. 94 for agitating the listeners’ brains.
Slipped Disc reliably publicizes obscure findings and ignores excellent scholarship.
Ah, but note how many responses — probably proportional to the number of clicks — reportage of obscure findings generates!
True. Just as snarky posts on performers’ gimmicks trigger more comments than great performances.
There are obvious differences between the two pieces that could account for this — but also, Haydn’s music is characterized by a nervous energy that Mozart only occasionally yields to (Charles Rosen discusses this in the Classical Style). So yes, I would say that Mozart’s music is generally more relaxing than Haydn’s. It doesn’t surprise me that one mitigates seizures, and the other doesn’t.
It’s a pity that more than one piece by each composer was not used in the study. Single-piece specific doesn’t seem sufficiently comprehensive to justify the finding about the composers rather than the pieces.
Amazingly conclusive!
This is scientific?
Isn’t one piece of music a symphony, and the other two pianos. As well as both being different in many other ways.
You’d have to actually test another composer’s two pianos, with who-ever’s symphony, and I don’t know all what.
I found out that a lightning storm eases my adrenaline less than the sound of flowing water. Does this mean that would I use an electrical reproduction of the sound of flowing water, that this would not help ease my adrenaline because both are involved with electrons?
Is there no piece of Haydn that helps with…..
A deeply flawed study as they did not include a symphony by Carl Stamitz in comparison to a concerto grosso by Schnittke.
Perhaps it’s the difference between piano and orchestra, rather than Mozart and Haydn. Too many variables!
I’ve long known that Haydn (if really is by him, lots of works attributed to him were really written by other) is bad for you.
“Papa” Haydn’s music is not good for you? The “founder” of the symphony and the father” of the string quartet (although both existed long before him)? The man who has more music written by others with his name attached to it than anyone else? Wouldn’t it have been easy and appropriate for him to admit this hundreds of years ago? What would the Esterhazy family say?
If the scientific author’s had played them Haydn’s “masterpiece”, however, “the Creation”, the epileptics like everyone else would have fallen asleep. It is mindless drivel.
I know of a patient with epilepsy whose condition is exacerbated by Bach played on a harpsichord. Must be the short, brittle sounds.
I demand a recount!