Music is the language of emotions, which awakens and controls our emotions. For example, research has shown that college students listen to music 37% of the time, and that it fills them with happiness, excitement, or nostalgia during 64% of these sessions.
Children may have more experience with music than adults. Survey data shows that 54% of teachers in South Korea use background music in schools. We also know that music is played 6.5 times per hour in American classrooms to help children learn.
But how soon do children develop a genuine appreciation and understanding for music? Our recent study, published in psychological studiessuggest that newborns may be more musical, particularly finding music pleasurable.
This can be seen as surprising because, after all, culture plays a major role in when and how we perceive music – it’s something we learn. Preschoolers, for example, are often unable to associate pictures of happy or sad faces with happy or sad music. Such abilities usually develop later in childhood.
It has long been unclear whether newborns and young children feel emotions in music. But we do know that newborns respond to aspects of music, such as its tempo, structure as well as consonance and dissonance.
Young babies also like “motheries”, a very musical, melodious and slow type of speech that adults often adopt when talking to babies. Even children who can hear but are born to deaf parents (who do not speak to them as such) pay attention to such speech or maternal-style singing.
Some research suggests that fetuses also respond to music. A study has shown that when pregnant women listen to their favorite songs in the 28th week of pregnancy, their fetal heartbeats increase, even though the mothers show no change in their own heart rates.
However, other studies have failed to detect any such response in fetuses. Music is often tested in neonatal intensive care units to help babies born prematurely. But of the ten most rigorous studies with newborns in intensive care units, only half found any behavioral response to music, such as less crying, stress or pain. And only half the studies found any effect on heart rate or blood pressure.
That said, very few studies have looked at how healthy, full-term newborns react to music. And no studies have examined how they react to emotion in music.
happy is calm
Our team looked at how music affected healthy newborns who were terminated. First, we wanted to pick one musical piece that was really happy, and another that was really sad.
Two experimenters collected and listened to hundreds of lullabies and children’s songs and selected 25 that sounded happy or sad. Of these, only six were sung in English (Simply Simon, Humpty Dumpty, Hey Diddle Diddle, Little Miss Muffet, Ding Dong Bell, Little Bo Beep) while the others were in several other languages.
A total of 16 adult participants helped rate the 25 songs for their emotional content. A French lullaby called Fais Dodo (by Alexandra Montano and Ruth Cunningham) was found to be the saddest, while a German song, Das Singende Kanguru (by Volker Rosin), was ranked as the happiest.
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We played these two songs in random order – with a silent control period – for 32 children in the first experiment. We also analyzed how 20 behaviours, such as crying, yawning, sucking, sleeping and limb movements, changed from millisecond to millisecond during musical pieces and silence, respectively.
In a second experiment, we recorded the heart rates of 66 newborns while they listened to these two songs or to silence.
Perhaps the most surprising result was that the babies tended to drift off to sleep during happy music, but not during sad music or when there was no music at all. In addition, they showed a decrease in their heart rates during happy music, but not during sad music or silent periods, suggesting they were calming down.
In response to both happy and sad music, the infants also moved their eyes less frequently and had longer pauses between their movements than during the silent period. This may mean that both types of music had some calming effect on the children compared to no music at all, but that the happy music was the best.
Our results suggest that newborns respond to emotion in music in this way, and that responses to music are present at birth. Previously, we worked with embryos and found that second and third trimester embryos respond when their mother is talking. So talking, singing and listening to music may pre-shape babies’ response to music in the womb.
Traditionally, lullabies are sung by caregivers, usually mothers. Such singing is very personal and emotional. Mothers who come to our lab often tell us that they suddenly remember singing to their babies long-forgotten lullabies that they heard from their mothers and grandmothers.
Mothers’ emotions while singing shape their children’s responses to music. Even for healthy babies, there is always a need for comforting intervention because they cry for an average of about two hours a day in the first weeks of life.
Soothing music, whether played or sung, is widespread around the world and across time for a reason. Babies are born with innate musicality and are sensitive to music. And we now know that it is happy, upbeat and upbeat music that particularly resonates with their psychological and physiological rhythms – soothing, calming and enabling sleep.
Dundee (dialogue)