Glenn Schellenberg

Glenn Schellenberg is Professor Emeritus in the Department of Psychology at the University of Toronto. Until July 1, 2020, he ran the Music & Cognition Lab at the University of Toronto Mississauga. From 2020 to 2026, he was principal researcher in Lisbon, Portugal at the Centro de Investigação Social (CIS), Instituto Universitário de Lisboa (ISCTE-IUL),

Over a career spanning more than three decades, Schellenberg has built a body of work that tracks how music shapes and is shaped by human cognition: from the foundational 1999 critique of the so-called Mozart Effect to the 2004 randomized controlled trial showing that music lessons enhance IQ in children, to a more recent large-scale study of how the emotional content of popular music has changed over decades.

Early life and education Schellenberg studied psychology at University of Toronto, where he received a B.Sc. He obtained a Ph.D. in psychology from Cornell University in 1994.

Career In the 1980s, Schellenberg played keyboards and was the principal songwriter for the synth-pop band To Be Announced, along with Paul Hackney, Steven Bock and Andrew Zealley. and performed live with Martha and the Muffins. Side-projects included The Beds (with Tony Malone) and Anti-Normal (with Tim Guest, Massimo Agostinelli, and Billy Sutherland).

Schellenberg composed music for three films directed by John Greyson. For one of these films, Zero Patience, Schellenberg was nominated, along with Greyson, for a Genie Award for Best Original Song for the song "Just Like Scheherazade". He also composed the theme song (and approximately 50 other songs) for a children's television show called The Adventures of Dudley the Dragon. His songs on the show were sung by Jackie Richardson, Jackie Burroughs, Eric Peterson, Graham Greene, and Clark Johnson.

Schellenberg joined the faculty of the University of Windsor as an assistant professor in 1993, conducting research into the psychology of music. He worked next as an associate professor at Dalhousie University for a single academic year, 1997-1998.

Schellenberg then moved to the University of Toronto Mississauga, where he became a full professor in 2004. He has published a number of research papers, including one about the evolution of pop music. His finding that pop songs have become increasingly melancholy over time was covered widely by the media. His main areas of research include memory for music, and how exposure to music is associated with non-musical abilities. During his sabbatical research leaves, Schellenberg had the opportunity to live and work in Sydney, Amsterdam, Berlin, Marseille, and Montpellier.

Research Schellenberg's research focuses on memory for music and how exposure to music is associated with non-musical abilities. His main areas of study include the effects of music training on cognitive abilities, the Mozart effect, the emotional impact of music listening, and memory for specific characteristics of music such as pitch/key, tempo, and timbre.

Music training and IQ In 2004, Schellenberg published "Music Lessons Enhance IQ" in Psychological Science, a randomized controlled study testing whether music lessons affect children's IQ. The study was covered by ScienceDaily at the time of publication and was the subject of a 2019 Undark feature, "Do Music Lessons Really Make Children Smarter?

In 2006, he published a follow-up study,"Long-Term Positive Associations Between music Lessons and IQ," in the Journal of Educational Psychology, examining the persistence of these associations.

Subsequent studies with collaborators including Katie Corrigall, Swathi Swaminathan, Ana Isabel Correia, and Aíssa Baldé indicated that associations between music training and non-musical abilities are more likely to reflect individual differences such as musical aptitude, general cognitive ability, personality, and socioeconomic status in who takes music lessons, rather than an effect of training itself. This perspective was summarized in a 2024 review article, "Music Training and Non musical Abilities," in the Annual Review of Psychology, co-authored with César Lima.

Mozart effect In 1999, Schellenberg and his student Kathleen Nantais published "The Mozart Effect: An Artifact of Preference" in Psychological Science, arguing that the popular claim that listening to Mozart temporarily raises spatial reasoning performance reflects changes in listeners' arousal and mood rather than an effect specific to Mozart's music. According to this account, a major key tends to promote a happier mood, while a faster tempo increases alertness, and either can produce a similar short-term performance boost.

Pop music and emotion During a research stay at the Free University of Berlin, Schellenberg and Christian von Scheve examined how the emotional content of popular music changed over several decades, finding that pop songs had become increasingly likely to use minor keys and slower tempos, associated with sadder-sounding music. The finding was covered by The Guardian and NPR and discussed on WNY's Studio 360, in a segment featuring commentary from in a segment featuring commentary from from Chuck Klosterman and Alice Cooper.

Memory for musical attributes In a 2003 study, Schellenberg and Sandra Trehub found that many listeners without musical training could reliably tell whether a familiar television theme was being played in its original key or shifted by one or two semitones, indicating detailed long-term memory for pitch. A follow-up study with Trehub found that an apparent East Asian advantage in pitch memory was better explained by differences in musical background than by ethnicity. Other work from his lab found that listeners form memories for the key and tempo of unfamiliar melodies after only a few hearings, and that changing the key or tempo at test impairs recognition, particularly after short delays.

Emotional responses to music and liking A 2004 study with Karl Szpunar and Patty Pliner found that liking and memory for musical excerpts increase with repeated exposure, though excessive repetition can eventually reduce liking. A 2008 study with Isabelle Peretz and Sandrine Vieillard found that although listeners generally prefer happy-sounding music, repeated quiet background exposure can raise liking for sad-sounding music to a comparable level. A later study found that emotional novelty for example, switching from a series of happy-sounding pieces to a sad-sounding one — tends to increase listeners' appreciation of the new piece.