Classical radio makes for mellower worms

Humans are not the only species soothed by the strains of classical radio. We know this thanks to Abram Sparks, an eighth-grader and budding scientist who lives in Hazel Green, Alabama.

Sparks won a regional science fair in April with an experiment in which he subjected worms to different musical genres. One bucket of worms listened to a radio playing classical music, while the other listened to rap. As the Huntsville Times reports, the worms in the classical bucket exhibited all the characteristics of respondents to public radio’s Classical Core Values study: they were soothed and free of stress, evidently a worm’s natural state. (It’s harder to say whether they had achieved “clarity of mind.”)

This was not the case for the worms subjected to rap. Sparks told the paper that those worms were “going crazy and trying to get out of the bucket.”

Sparks deserves recognition for his already significant contributions to both musicology and helminthology. However, the Huntsville Times article leaves some questions unanswered. Such as: which radio station were the worms listening to? Was it Huntsville’s WLRH? Or were they actually listening to CDs, and the reporter misused the label of “radio”?

And which musicians? Was the rap Tupac, or A Tribe Called Quest? And was the classical Bach and Brahms, or Schnittke and Schoenberg? These are important distinctions. With any luck, Abram Sparks could secure federal funding to extend his research and further our understanding.