Playing Mozart to babies has become de rigueur for the caring parent. But a medical paper published today argues that the great composer is not alone in his capacity to soothe.
Professor John Jenkins, its author, has found evidence from around the world that other composers, including JS Bach, can benefit health.
He is calling for more research to discover the key ingredient in the so-called Mozart effect, which is claimed to enhance children's intelligence and, among other things, decrease the occurrence of fits among people with epilepsy.
"If you go into music shops, you'll find CDs of Mozart with a picture of a baby on the sleeve and the words, 'Your baby needs Mozart'," Professor Jenkins, an emeritus professor at the University of London, said. "I think that's jumping the gun but this is something that needs further investigation."
Professor Jenkins examined research dating back to 1993 that showed Mozart boosted the spatial reasoning powers the ability to visualise of those who listened to it.
Results suggested that 10 minutes of Mozart improved the performance of tasks such as paper-cutting and folding.
Later evidence showed that rats negotiated a maze faster after hearing Mozart than rats that could hear nothing at all or that were played minimalist music.
In another study, children who were taught the piano for six months did better on the kind of spatial reasoning that makes good chess players and mathematicians than children who spent time on computers.
"It doesn't have an effect on ordinary basic intelligence, it was this particular spatial intelligence that worked," Professor Jenkins writes in the Journal of the Royal Society of Medicine.
Computer analysis showed that the Mozart piano concerto K448 had "long-term periodicity" wave forms that were repeated regularly, but not very close together, throughout the music.
Both JS Bach and JC Bach shared similar patterns, as does Yanni, a contemporary Greek-American composer whose music also had beneficial effects.
But music such as the minimalist compositions of Philip Glass or most early pop music did not have this factor.
Professor Jenkins' review comes as the Performing Right Society (PRS), which collects composers' royalties, publishes its own evidence on the hidden benefits of music, called "The Power of Music", on its website.
Defending the importance of music
Andrew Potter, the society's chairman, said: "The PRS is concerned mainly with putting a financial value on music on behalf of writers and composers, but actually you can only do that if society in general thinks music is important."
The PRS also gives donations and subsidies to musical organisations through its own foundation and found they were frequently having to defend the importance of music to other funding bodies.
This was an attempt to produce more than the normal anecdotal evidence, a body of evidence to show that music was valuable not only in the non-material sense but in terms of helping social problems and psychological problems, Mr Potter said.
Professor Sue Hallam, who did the review for the PRS, found that music could help babies born prematurely or underweight as well as sufferers of dyslexia, Alzheimer's disease and epilepsy.