If you're a parent, you might be wondering what music is best to play for your baby. Will Mozart make her smarter? Will the simplistic Barney theme song stultify his brain? Can I nurture a preference for Tori Amos over Britney Spears?
Jeremy Eichler, writing in the July 13 issue of The Boston Globe, takes a look at the infant musical mind. "Researchers have soundly debunked the so-called Mozart effect - the notion that listening to Mozart helps with the execution of certain tasks, or more generally that Mozart makes you smarter," he writes. One study of undergraduates found that sipping on a strawberry milkshake worked just as well as Mozart at increasing performance.
Nonetheless, babies do respond to music. By two months they show a preference for consonant or dissonant music; by eight months they can grasp the structure of unfamiliar scales. According to Eric Hannon, who conducted a study with Sandra Trehub at the University of Nevada, Las Vegas, infants start life with the ability to perceive complex rhythms, but they lose this skill unless it is called upon in their environment. Clearly, a diet of only simple "baby" tunes is not ideal.
Can we create preferences for certain types of music? Eichler talked with Laurel Trainor, director of the Auditory Development Lab at McMaster University in Ontario. One study at her lab showed that the way adults bounced with their babies -- in a march rhythm or a waltz rhythm -- affected whether babies preferred to listen to marches or waltzes.
But babies also recognize and prefer music to which they were exposed before birth. Cocooned inside the womb, the fetus hears sounds: the heartbeat of its mother, external sounds transmitted through the amniotic fluid. By the fifth month, its auditory system is fully functional. Researcher Alexandra Lamont of Keele University in the United Kingdom conducted an experiment in which mothers played a single piece of music repeatedly to their babies during the final three months of pregnancy. In some cases the piece was eighteenth century classical music, and in other cases it was popular music. For one year following the child's birth, each mother was not allowed to play that piece of music, but after the baby's first birthday, Lamont played the music that the baby had heard in the womb, along with another piece matched for style and tempo. The infant would look for a longer time at the speaker from which the familiar music emanated, whether it came from the left or right side. A control group of infants who had not heard any of the music before exhibited no preference.
As children develop, however, the tastes of their peers have a greater influence on their musical preferences -- which is good, because it allows us to evolve and appreciate different music. When I was five, I would sit in my rocking chair and listen to Mitch Miller marches, a record played by my parents since I was born. But I no longer have any particular fondness for marches.
Still, the very act of listening is formative. "More and more labs are showing that people have the sensitivity for skills that we thought were only expert skills," says Henkjan Honing of the University of Amsterdam, whose work has demonstrated how much the brain can learn through active exposure to many different kinds of music. "It turns out that mere exposure makes an enormous contribution to how musical competence develops. But it's the variety that counts."
So, the bottom line? Both Barney and Mozart, and everything in between, is good for your baby.
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