Born to love music
Here’s a crazily miraculous fact: our musicality is imprinted upon our tiny listening bodies even before we are born, because our hearing functions from our sixth prenatal month. And what are the first sounds we experience? As neuroscientist Laurel Trainor of Mcmaster University in Canada reveals, the soundscape of the womb is ‘like hearing underwater: babies hear sounds from the mother, her heartbeat, her voice. And they receive sounds from the outside world – mostly low frequencies, because that’s what will travel through the liquid medium’.
Science also shows that there are parameters of music that babies find most energising and soothing.
For stimulation, music needs to be sonorously rhythmic, and because babies’ heartbeats are faster than adults’ it needs to trip along at a speed that’s faster than most dance music or symphonic first movements. From the opposite end of the spectrum, lullabies – soothing, predictable, slow-moving melodies – are used the world over to send tiny humans off, as does Caractacus Potts in Chitty Chitty Bang Bang with his lullaby to Hushabye Mountain.
And babies’ musical engagement can take so many forms. Our tiny brains are hard-wired to recognise the sounds we’ve been listening to in the womb when we’re finally born, reinforcing the bond with our mothers through the sound of their voices. But babies have no musical prejudices that say that
‘Baby Shark’ is better than Mozart – or possibly vice versa.
Our brains are hard-wired to recognise the sounds we’ve been listening to in the womb
And they love an avant-garde workout. Seriously: Andrew Davenport is the creator and composer of the children’s TV show In the Night Garden. His music for the Tombliboos, sowers of playful chaos in the show, make a joyous clanging from percussion and piano instruments, a delirium of dissonance that would have most concert hall audiences up in arms at the experimental noise-scape they were hearing. But In the Night Garden’s audience of infants loves it – both hearing the noises, and making them for themselves on whatever makeshift percussion their little bodies and unbounded imaginations can find.
Babies have an innate musical wisdom. They play with and are played by music. They surrender to the totality of how music affects them, and have an instinctive response to that stimulation – to move, to exclaim, to join in, or to be soothed by the cradling and rocking of a parent’s lullaby.
That state of surrender is one we’ll spend the rest of our lives as adults trying to reclaim. We know it when we lose ourselves to the transcendences we feel in the concert hall or opera house: all of those immersions are symbolic returns to the all-encompassing ocean of sound in which we’re born. That’s what we crave from our music as conscious adults, just as much as we do as when we’re developing infants.