Category: Infants and music

  • Music in the NICU

    Music in the NICU

    A friend who is a chaplain in a nearby hospital often sings to the premature infants in the neonatal intensive care unit (NICU).  She does this because it just feels like the right thing to do. Don’t we always sing to babies to soothe and comfort them? And she notices that the babies immediately calm…

  • Music, language, and babies

    Within days of my last post about babies and interactive music classes, a study came out saying literally the same thing about babies and language – that interaction with a parent is key to language development for babies just as the interactive music making was crucial in developing music skills for babies. Researchers have known for years…

  • New year – new musical beginnings

    What better way to begin the new year than by talking about new lives and musical beginnings!  Babies and music are a source of endless fascination – and the subject of a lot of research.  We know that babies like to be sung to (think lullabies), they like bouncing or waving their arms when they hear music, they…

  • Should everyone be able to make music if we’re hardwired for it?

    I thought I had finished writing this post when a fascinating new study appeared in my Inbox, and I simply had to incorporate it.  Researchers at the University of Helsinki have discovered that, for several months after birth, infants can recognize a melody that they have heard in utero.  In a study of 24 women…

  • Are we hardwired for music?

    Music has usually been studied as a cultural product – specific to a certain time and place. We associate different kinds of music, tuning systems, qualities of the sound and kinds of instruments with different ethnic groups or different cultural societies.  And we attribute different structural forms, harmonic systems and (again) instruments to various time…