Music Touches Us All

Amelia Bachleda: Hello, everyone. Welcome. We're so excited that you're here with us today. My name is Amelia Bachleda, and I'm here with my colleague Marie Baeta.

Marie Baeta: Hi, everyone. We are from the National Center on Early Childhood Development, Teaching and Learning, NCECDTL. We're based at I-LABS, the Institute for Learning & Brain Sciences here at the University of Washington. I-LABS is an NCECDTL partner organization and is an interdisciplinary research center that's dedicated to understanding human learning, with a focus on early learning and the brain.

Amelia: We are so excited to be here with all of you today to talk about a really fun topic – babies and music. OK. Before we go in, let's talk a little bit about what we're going to do today. We're going to talk about how music influences the development of infants and toddlers and importantly, the relationships with caregivers. Then, of course, we're also going to talk about strategies for integrating music and singing into your learning environments.

Marie: Language and music are the most common types of sound we hear every single day, and music occurs in every culture around the world. Of course, this type of music, why we play the music, how we enjoy the music varies. Is it for funerals, for dancing, for enjoyment, for performance, cultural expression, storytelling? In one way or another, music is really part of our all of our lives, and for many of us, music plays a very important role.

Amelia: That's right. We might have memories connected to certain songs or music that we always play for certain celebrations or for the everyday things that we do. We'd love for you to take a minute and think a little bit about your own life and how music is a part of it. What role does music play in your life? We’d love for you to add it to the chat or to the Q&A box. What types of music do you sing or hear most often? Is there a certain day or situation where you like to listen to music? We’d just love to hear your thoughts about music in general. So take a minute and share with us how you feel about music in your everyday life. Marie, what about you? How do you like to think about music in your life?

Marie: The first thing that comes to mind is when I need to do a chore, like wash the dishes. I always – Playing music really motivates me and gets me into a groove space of just being able to dive into things. I love also listening to music while I'm driving, and I play a little bit of music, but funnily, I only play guitar when I'm in love, which is a funny way to – another way that we use music for expression. How about you, Amelia?

Amelia: Totally. I love that. I love certain types of music for certain times in our lives. Yeah, totally. I also have music that I like to listen to, to try and help me get into a task or focus. Then I really feel like, if I think about music in my life, that I have certain soundtracks to different eras of my life. What I listened to when I was in high school – what did I listen to when I was in college? Right now, I have a little kiddo myself, and so I'm singing a lot of Raffi songs. It's the soundtrack of my current life.

OK. Music really is part of our lives almost from the very beginning – and I mean super beginning. Hearing is one of the first senses that we have that develops, and in fact, it begins developing in the womb, in utero, around the third trimester, and the baby is hearing sounds from there. The only sounds they can hear are from their birth parents, so the sound of their voice, maybe the sounds when their tummy muscles squeeze, when they laugh or breathe. But we know that these developing babies, they are hearing sounds in the womb and importantly, they're learning from them.

When babies are born, they recognize their parent’s voice and are more soothed by their parent’s voice. We know that they recognize it. It's the most familiar sound to them. They can also tell the difference between their birth parent’s language and a foreign language, which is really cool. We know that they are learning those sounds of language while they're in the womb developing.

Marie: That's right. The sounds that they hear from their birth parent even seem to influence the sounds that infants make just after being born, which is kind of incredible. One study investigated the cries of French and German babies within five days of being born, and they found that the German and French babies differed in the rise and fall of their cries. I think it was French babies make a rising contour to their cry, and German babies make a lowering contour, which mirrors the language that they're hearing from inside their birth parent. It's kind of incredible that they're really paying attention to these language cues even before they're born.