Music Myths Checked
11 Things People Believe About Music

Some of the most repeated facts about music come from a single study, a marketing story or a rumour that took on a life of its own. Below are eleven common beliefs, each checked against the original research, court records, museum collections or the companies involved.

How to read the verdicts: MYTH means the sources contradict the belief. PARTLY TRUE means there is something to it, but the usual version overstates it. DISPUTED means researchers disagree.

1. “Listening to Mozart makes you smarter”

Myth The idea goes back to a 1993 letter in Nature, “Music and spatial task performance”. A 1999 meta-analysis in the same journal summarised the claim as “listening to ten minutes of Mozart’s music increased the abstract reasoning ability of college students, as measured by IQ scores, by 8 or 9 points”. It concluded that “any cognitive enhancement is small and does not reflect any change in IQ or reasoning ability in general”.

A larger meta-analysis in 2010 went further. According to the University of Vienna’s summary, it covered “about 40 independent studies” with “more than 3000 participants”, and found “there remains no support for gains in spatial ability specifically due to listening to Mozart music”.

2. “Auto-Tune was invented for Cher (or T-Pain)”

Myth Auto-Tune existed before either of them used it. Antares, the company that makes it, says: “AutoTune was first released in 1997 by Dr. Andy Hildebrand.” The Recording Academy, which gave him a Technical Grammy in 2023, says the same, and notes that he previously pioneered “3-D seismic-mapping technologies in the oil industry”.

The famous audible effect came later: the Recording Academy says that “everything changed in 1998” when Cher’s “Believe”, with its “deliberately unsubtle pitch-processing effect”, brought the sound to the public.

3. “Beethoven was completely deaf when he wrote his music”

Myth His hearing declined over decades. In June 1801 he wrote to a friend: “My hearing has been getting weaker and weaker for 3 years”. The Beethoven-Haus in Bonn notes that in 1812 he met “the mechanic Johann Nepomuk Maelzel”, and that “Maelzel constructed various ear trumpets for Beethoven”. It adds that “By around 1814/15, Beethoven was as good as deaf in his right ear.”

Even in 1815, a 2021 medical review notes, people could still talk to him “by speaking into the left ear”. How much he could hear at the very end is argued. The well-known story from the premiere of the Ninth Symphony in May 1824 — that the contralto soloist had to turn him round to see the applause — comes from her own account, told to the music writer George Grove decades later. Grove’s book notes that the anecdote “is given in several forms in the books”. The usual view is that by his last decade he was profoundly deaf: from 1818 he relied on “conversation books” in which friends wrote their side, and the same review repeats that at the 1824 premiere he “did not even hear the frenetic jubilation”. Theodore Albrecht, who translates the conversation books, has argued that he could still hear, “mostly with his left ear”, at that premiere. Most accounts do not go that far.

4. “Humans hear from 20 Hz to 20,000 Hz”

Partly true It is a textbook figure: “Humans can detect sounds in a frequency range from about 20 Hz to 20 kHz.” The same textbook adds that “the upper limit in average adults is often closer to 15–17 kHz”.

A 2021 study of 162 healthy adults found that among those under 30, “52.2% could respond to 20 kHz”, while “no responsiveness was recorded to 20 kHz in the 51 ~ 60 group”. At the low end, a review notes that “humans can perceive infrasound, if the level is sufficiently high”. So the range is a rough guide for young ears, not a fixed limit for everyone.

5. “432 Hz is the natural tuning, and 440 Hz was imposed”

Myth Concert pitch varied for centuries. One history of the standard notes pitches of “A=423 Hz in the case of Handel and A=422 Hz in the case of Mozart”, and that “in 1859, a French government commission made A=435 Hz law in that country”. The international standard was agreed at a 1939 conference: Nature reported in 1939 on “an International Conference on May 11 and 12 last”, attended by delegates from “France, Germany, Great Britain, Holland and Italy”. A=440 was later reaffirmed by the International Organization for Standardization, whose standard says the note A “shall be 440 Hz”.

We found no source showing that 432 Hz is more “natural”. On health claims, the evidence is thin: a 2019 pilot study of “33 volunteers” reported that 432 Hz music “can decrease heart rate more than 440 Hz tuned music”, and its authors called for “repeating the experiment with a larger sample pool”. A few small trials since then have reported mixed results: a 2025 trial with 43 cancer patients found that, on most heart measures, a sound session tuned to 432 Hz gave effects that “were not significantly different” from the same session tuned to 443 Hz, the concert pitch of German orchestras, and another 2025 study of 28 kickboxers found warming up to their preferred music at 440 Hz “more effective” than at 432 Hz. Studies this small do not establish an effect either way.

6. “The loudness war is over because streaming normalises volume”

Partly true Some streaming services now turn loud tracks down. Spotify says: “We adjust tracks to -14 dB LUFS”, and “Negative gain is applied to louder masters”. That removes much of the reason to master music as loud as possible.

But it is not universal. Spotify notes that “The web player and 3rd-party devices (like TVs or speakers) don’t use loudness normalization.” YouTube’s volume-balancing feature “is turned off for YouTube Music and official music videos.” And the Audio Engineering Society recommends a different level for track normalisation than Spotify does. We found no measurement showing that commercial releases have actually become quieter, so “over” goes further than the evidence.

7. “Paul McCartney died in 1966 and was replaced”

Myth The rumour spread through US student newspapers and radio in autumn 1969. The Columbia Journalism Review describes how the autumn 1969 wave took off after a student newspaper article of 17 September 1969 asked “Is Beatle Paul McCartney Dead?”

McCartney answered it himself in LIFE magazine on 7 November 1969. Explaining one of the supposed “clues”, a police badge, he said: “I picked up that O.P.D. badge in Canada.”

8. “A Stradivarius sounds better than a modern violin”

Myth (in blind tests). When players and listeners could not see the instruments, the old violins did not come out ahead. In a 2012 study, “the most-preferred violin was new; the least-preferred was by Stradivari”. In a 2014 study, “6 of the 10 soloists chose a new instrument” for a hypothetical tour, and “Soloists failed to distinguish new from old at better than chance levels.” A 2017 listener study found “The new violins projected better than the Stradivaris”.

Two caveats. All three studies come largely from one research team, and the 2014 study drew a published letter in PNAS arguing that a player’s memory of a violin’s timbre fades within seconds, too fast to compare instruments while swapping them, so such tests would tend to find no difference unless the differences are striking. The authors replied that they were testing whether a player can tell old from new just by playing a violin, without comparing it with others, so “Memory is therefore not the issue”. And the old instruments really are physically different: a separate study found that “maples in Stradivari violins have very different chemical properties compared with their modern counterparts”. The blind tests show that experts could not reliably hear the difference they expected.

9. “Music lessons raise children’s IQ”

Disputed A 2004 experiment that randomly assigned “144” children found that those given music lessons showed “greater increases in full-scale IQ. The effect was relatively small”.

A 2020 meta-analysis of 54 studies concluded that the belief “is incorrect”: “Once the quality of study design is controlled for, the overall effect of music training programs is null”. A 2022 re-analysis of the same data disagreed: “Reanalyzing their data file resulted in a significant effect size (g = .234)”. Neither side finds more than a small effect; they disagree on whether it survives once weaker studies are accounted for.

But a 2024 review in the Annual Review of Psychology, co-written by the author of the 2004 study, concluded that “the evidence that music training causes nonmusical benefits is weak or nonexistent”. The weight of evidence leans against a real IQ effect, though the reanalysis keeps the question open.

10. “‘Happy Birthday’ was under copyright until recently”

Partly true For decades music publishers claimed a copyright in the song and charged for its use. In September 2015 a US federal court held that the defendant publishers, as “Summy Co.’s purported successors-in-interest”, did not own a valid copyright in the lyrics: “Because Summy Co. never acquired the rights to the Happy Birthday lyrics”. The court noted that copyright in the earlier song “Good Morning”, which supplied the melody, had “expired in 1949.” The case ended in a settlement, with a final judgment entered on 30 June 2016.

So the song was claimed and licensed as a copyright until 2015, but a court found that claim to the lyrics was not valid. This covers the US case only.

11. “Mozart wrote ‘Twinkle, Twinkle, Little Star’”

Myth Mozart wrote a set of variations on a tune that already existed. The official catalogue of his works lists them as “Twelve variations in C on “Ah, vous dirai-je, Maman” for clavier”, and the catalogue’s general note on his keyboard variations says that “The typical set of variations by Mozart is based on a preexisting melody”. The French tune was in print decades before his variations.

The English words are a separate poem: the Poetry Foundation lists “The Star” among Jane Taylor’s poems, noting that “Twinkle, Twinkle Little Star” was “first published as “The Star””.

What these have in common

• A single result grows in the retelling. The Mozart effect started as a small finding on one kind of task.
• A product’s famous use is not its origin. Auto-Tune existed before the song that made it famous.
• A gradual change becomes a dramatic one. Beethoven’s hearing loss took decades, not a single moment.

Sources

• Rauscher, Shaw and Ky, “Music and spatial task performance”, Nature (1993); Chabris, “Prelude or requiem for the ‘Mozart effect’?”, Nature (1999); University of Vienna summary of Pietschnig, Voracek and Formann, “Mozart effect–Shmozart effect: A meta-analysis”, Intelligence (2010), via ScienceDaily (10 May 2010).
• Antares, “About” and “Auto-Tune Inventor Dr. Andy Hildebrand Wins 2023 Technical GRAMMY®!”; Recording Academy, 2023 Special Merit Awards and “Dr. Andy Hildebrand” feature; US Patent 5,973,252.
• Beethoven-Haus Bonn, “Heard with Beethoven’s ear”; George Grove, Beethoven and His Nine Symphonies (3rd ed., 1898); Thomas et al., “Aetiology of Ludwig van Beethoven’s hearing impairment”, European Archives of Oto-Rhino-Laryngology (2021); Boydell & Brewer, “Beethoven could hear after all” (3 February 2020).
• Purves et al. (eds.), Neuroscience (2nd ed.), “The Audible Spectrum”; Wang et al., “Extended high-frequency audiometry in healthy adults with different age groups” (2021); Møller and Pedersen, “Hearing at low and infrasonic frequencies” (2004).
• Kaye, “International Standard of Concert Pitch”, Nature (1939); Cavanagh, “A brief history of the establishment of international standard pitch a=440 hertz”; Calamassi and Pomponi, Explore (2019); ISO 16:1975, Acoustics — Standard tuning frequency; Hohneck et al., BMC Complementary Medicine and Therapies (2025); a 2025 kickboxing warm-up study, PeerJ.
• Spotify for Artists, “Loudness normalization”; YouTube Help, “Control video volume on your device”; Audio Engineering Society, AESTD1008 (2021).
• Columbia Journalism Review, “Misinformation and the saga of ‘Paul is Dead’” (20 December 2021); LIFE, 7 November 1969.
• Fritz et al., PNAS (2012, 2014, 2017); Tai et al., “Chemical distinctions between Stradivari’s maple and modern tonewood”, PNAS (2017); Tai, “Role of timbre memory in evaluating Stradivari violins”, PNAS (2014), and Fritz, Curtin and Poitevineau’s reply.
• Schellenberg, “Music lessons enhance IQ”, Psychological Science (2004); Sala and Gobet, Memory & Cognition (2020); Bigand and Tillmann, “Near and far transfer: Is music special?”, Memory & Cognition (2022); Schellenberg and Lima, “Music Training and Nonmusical Abilities”, Annual Review of Psychology (2024).
• Marya v. Warner/Chappell Music, Inc., C.D. Cal. (2015) and docket (final judgment 30 June 2016).
• International Mozarteum Foundation, Köchel catalogue, KV 265; Poetry Foundation, Jane Taylor.

Checked September 2026.

Related: Real or myth: 14 things the internet keeps repeating · Cognitive biases checked