Babies and Music

Baby Music (by: Peter N. Spotts)

Move over Gershwin; these babies "got rhythm."

Researchers at Cornel University and the University of Toronto wondered if newborns show the same responsiveness to different forms of music that they do to languages and facial features. For the first six months, it appears, babies are open to everything - only to begin narrowing the range of their responses to species-specific or culture-specific cues at about nine months.

The team exposed newborns from Western parents to patterns in Balkan folk tunes. Then they disrupted the rhythm patterns to see if the babies could sense the change as readily as they could in music from their own culture. They did. Once the newborns hit nine months, however, they had become increasingly tuned to their own culture's music. By 12 months, their ability to detect rhythm disruptions in the more exotic tunes had vanished. Yet once the scientists briefly exposed the 12-month-olds to the Balkan tunes again, they once again could sense the disruptions in those tunes.

The results, the team concludes, established that the emergence of cultural preferences for music mirror the emergence of preferences for languages and facial features. They also suggest that music must be added to the list of socially and biologically significant stimuli for newborns.

The results appear in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.