Monday, June 8, 2009

J.S. Bach, Mozart to improve chess playing?

I'm sure many of us have heard about the so called "Mozart Effect", a popular but debatable theory suggesting that just by listening to the music of Wolfgang Amedeus Mozart (Piano sonata in D K.448) it can actually help to improve one's cognitional and spatial thinking even for just a short period of time. Browsing the web, I also found out that there's another research going on about this theory (thus remain inconclusive) that by listening to Johan Sebastian Bach's finely crafted prelude and fugues for fifteen to twenty minutes can be an ideal brain warm up before the start of a mental work out that requires quick and short term thinking. And this come with the likes of blitz chess. How so? Bach's prelude and fugue for instance exhibits precise calculation, tempo, strict patterns and judgment to make the musical piece perfectly written. Same rules as chess. It is not clear however whether by listening to this music for longer period of time has a cumulative effect. No wonder why Fritz, Chessmaster and other computer chess program chose the music of Bach to be their musical theme.

Nonetheless, my own theory is that unless we are at least appreciative to this kind of musics, (if we are not into classical altogether), it will produced little or no effect at all.







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