You Are the Music: How Music Reveals What it Means to be Human (2 page)

PART I

Music in early life

Chapter 1

First musical steps

‘I was born with music inside me. Music was one of my parts. Like my ribs, my kidneys, my liver, my heart. Like my blood. It was a force already within me when I arrived on the scene.’

RAY CHARLES

Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart was born in Salzburg in 1756 and went on to become one of the world’s most prolific and influential composers. Although he lived for only 35 years and died over 200 years ago, sales of his exquisite music regularly top the classical music charts and he is frequently voted in the top five composers of all time.

Mozart was playing and composing music by the age of five. Because of this he is often cited as the prime example of a human being who was ‘born musical’ – far more musical, in fact, than the rest of us. But was he?

There is no doubt that Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart had a very early start to his musical career and that he had a ‘pushy parent’. Johann Georg Leopold Mozart was one of Europe’s leading music teachers and in the year of his seventh child’s birth he published his dense textbook
Versuch einer gründlichen Violinschule
(‘A Treatise on the Fundamental Principles of Violin Playing’). According to reports, little Mozart received intensive musical instruction from his father before he could even speak.

There is such a thing as talent and there are such things as prodigies, though our present understanding of both concepts is still hotly debated.
¹
Perhaps because of this fact I am inclined to believe that it was mostly Mozart’s unique upbringing that set him apart musically from the rest of us. Whether Mozart possessed advanced natural musical ability or not, the point I want to make here is that all babies are born musical, not just our finest composers.

We are born musical because our first experiences of music are pre-birth, as the womb is flooded with the musiclike sounds of our world: the pitch glides, the melodies and the beats of body movements, voices, natural and artificial sounds. As a result of this early exposure, newborns come into this world possessing an impressive set of basic musical skills that play an important role in general development, quite aside from the issue of whether or not the child goes on to learn how to play a piano or pluck a violin.

When it comes to musicality, everyone had to start somewhere, including Mozart. And as we shall see we all have something in common with Ray Charles: we were born with music already inside of us.

Music in the womb

I have never seen a ‘prega-phone’ but I remember the first time I was told about their existence. I was giving a lecture on music psychology for the Open University, during which I discussed the origins of musical skills. A member of the audience raised their hand to point out that you could improve a baby’s lifelong musical skills by playing them music through a microphone strapped to a pregnant woman’s tummy: the aptly named prega-phone. It turns out that you can buy all sorts of similar devices.

Given what I knew about music and brain development I thought it unlikely that intensive prenatal music exposure
could benefit later musical development but I set out to investigate this question anyway. If nothing else, then the next time I was faced with a similar comment I could be a little more useful to the audience than simply playing devil’s advocate.

Before we look at the effect of prenatal music listening on development, let’s deal with the first important physiological question: what does music sound like before we are born?

Music doesn’t sound like anything until about the fourth month of pregnancy, the stage at which human hearing begins to function. It then takes about another two months for the fine structures of the ear that detect frequencies (for example, the cochlea) to fully form.
²
At this point an
in utero
baby becomes aware of a range of auditory stimulation from the environment. What they actually hear is a matter very much open to debate.

Given that a foetus is surrounded by amniotic fluid, we can assume that they perceive sounds a little like when they are played under water. Not many swimming pools are fitted with underwater speakers and there is a good reason for this; in this submarine environment you may be aware of pitch movements in the low register, changes in volume and maybe a strong beat, but the fine detail is largely lost. Picking out instruments or singers can be almost impossible, because of the loss of high frequencies, and finer points of melody are also hard to detect.

A developing foetus would find it even harder to follow the exact detail of music early on, as they will be hearing other sounds much closer to them, such as the mother’s digestive system, air movements through her lungs, and the activity of her heart and blood vessels.

At the time of writing there are no known studies of musical sound in the human womb (recordings are only really possible during labour) but recordings in pregnant sheep have found at least a 10-decibel reduction in external sound within
the womb,
³
with less reduction in low frequency sounds compared to higher frequencies. If you tried to identify words in this kind of environment you would probably get about 40 per cent of them right.
⁴

What does all this mean for our prega-phone? I have seen no evidence that
in utero
hearing devices offer anything more in terms of sound transmission than a pair of headphones over the abdomen or a seat close to a speaker, although I’m assured that they offer some ergonomic comfort for the mother. What is undeniable is that a typically developing foetus can hear what is going on in their external world during the last trimester.

Although we can’t know exactly what a foetus hears in the womb, their brain responses to sound can be studied using a specially adapted form of fMEG (foetal magnetoencephalography). This kind of scan requires a mother to kneel with her tummy enclosed with a specially adapted series of sensors (known as a SQUID array) that pick up the minute magnetic changes around the foetal head caused by brain activity.

Using the SQUID array device researchers have shown that from around 28 weeks gestation the majority of foetuses can detect frequency changes in the range of 250Hz, equivalent to the gap across five white notes in the upper middle section of a piano (octave five).
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What is more, research conducted during labour using a hydrophone has found that foetal hearing reaches impressive levels, being described in some studies as near perfect.
⁶

I have often been asked whether a foetus enjoys music in the womb; for example, when a baby kicks in response to music I have heard it said that this is because they like the sound. I’m sure I don’t have to tell you that it’s not possible to determine the aesthetic preferences of a foetus: in terms of their movement and heart rate, being asleep probably appears similar to being bored, and being excited probably appears
similar to annoyance. That is assuming, of course, that such emotional states are possible in one so young.

And while a foetus can certainly respond to music, there is no suggestion that this is in any way different to how they respond to all manner of external auditory stimuli, including sirens, animal cries or, as we shall see in a minute, aircraft take-off. So let’s leave the point of musical preference on one side for now.

Whether or not unborn babies have a preference for sound has little bearing on the question of whether they remember what they hear. We have known for a long time that babies can remember sounds that they have experienced
in utero
because of their behaviour once they are born. Newborns respond more frequently and regularly to their mother’s voice, the voice with which they are undoubtedly most familiar because of the direct transmission it gets through her body.

A great example of foetal memory for other sounds was a study conducted with babies whose mothers had lived near Osaka International Airport, Japan during pregnancy. After they were born these infants were not woken by, and had little or no discernible brain wave reaction to, recorded aircraft noise. By comparison they were awakened and disturbed by a music sequence that had similar characteristics to the sound of planes taking off.
⁷

In theory therefore a foetus can become accustomed to and remember musical sounds if they hear them as frequently as those babies heard aircraft take-off – but can newborns really remember complex music, given the increased difficulties with the muffled nature of the sound?

In my previous research post I spent many a happy coffee break chatting about life with our head technician, Maurice, a good friend of mine. When I mentioned I was writing this chapter he told me a story about one of his wife’s pregnancies. At the time she was a fan of
Neighbours
, the long-running
Australian soap opera. The show had had the same theme tune for years, marked by large pitch leaps and a steady beat, two musical features that have a good chance of getting through to a foetus. Maurice says that when little Matthew was born he would react strongly to the
Neighbours
theme: his face lit up, he searched around for the source of the sound, and he made animated noises. Maurice is convinced that Matthew remembered the
Neighbours
theme tune from his time in the womb, as he didn’t react this way to other music.

This everyday anecdotal experience of infant response to
in utero
music is supported by science. In 2011, Carolyn Granier-Deferre and her team played women a novel descending piano melody twice daily during the 35th, 36th, and 37th weeks of their pregnancy.
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At six weeks old the newborn babies were played these melodies again while they were asleep, along with a similar control melody that went up instead of down. The researchers measured the heart rates of these 25 babies and compared them to the responses of 25 ‘control’ babies who had not heard any of the tunes before.

All the tunes triggered a decrease in the babies’ heart rates (by about five to six beats per minute) but the familiar tunes had twice the relaxing effect on the 25 babies who had heard them in the womb.

This extra deceleration in heart rate in response to the downward melodies is a remarkable finding when you consider that the babies had not really heard the melodies very often – probably less frequently than little Matthew had heard the
Neighbours
theme tune over the course of his mum’s pregnancy and certainly less than the Osaka babies had heard aircraft taking off – but still their sleeping heart rate responses gave away the fact that they remembered this musical shape.

In utero
exposure to music may be limited and missing the full complexity that we hear outside the womb, but the fact that babies are sensitive to and can learn to recognise musical
sounds means that by the time they are born they have had months of exposure to some of the basic features of music (rhythms and contours) and thereby months of opportunities to learn about musical sound.

This finding leads to a series of interesting questions, that take me right back to the comment made by my Open University student: does prenatal exposure impact on later musical skills? Will increasing foetal exposure to music make for a more musical baby or, even more controversially, a smarter baby?

The majority of the evidence says ‘no’. Not a single study to date has convincingly demonstrated that increasing prenatal music exposure above the typical amount heard in everyday life improves later musical perception or production. It’s not the case, for example, that parents who are both musicians always produce a child who is interested in or skilled in music.

I doubt that we will ever see evidence for a direct effect of prenatal music on musical skill either, for one good reason: what happens
after
a child is born, as with young Mozart, is lilkely to be far more important to musical development than degree of exposure in the womb.

It’s important to emphasise that all sounds, whether we think of them as musical or not, will transmit ‘musical’ information to a foetus due to the qualities of the womb environment. In the final trimester a foetus hears the sounds of voices, industry, and nature as a series of beats and movements in pitch. It’s not clear how or why flooding the foetus with extra music makes any difference – if anything, such a strategy may block exposure to the wide variety of useful sounds that they might otherwise hear, such as familiar voices.

I will leave it to my next chapter to get into the debate about whether musical exposure can boost intelligence – suffice to say there is no evidence that
prenatal
musical exposure improves intelligence in
newborns
. And while it may be possible to create a musical memory for a newborn that they
associate with beneficial relaxation responses, we now know that familiar voices, a human heartbeat and even planes taking off can all have similar effects.

Prenatal music intervention may not lead to a more musical baby or a smarter baby but the sounds that babies hear in the womb are still important. In the next section we see how our young are born with some pretty impressive basic musical skills – partly due to typical
in utero
sound exposure.

There will always be a debate about nature and nurture when it comes to newborns’ abilities, but exposure to musical aspects of sound in the womb influences the development of the building blocks for later musical skills. The crucial thing about building blocks, though, is that they are basic and can go only so far – if you don’t continue to build with them, they will stay at the same level.

Newborn rhythm

A newborn’s experience is not the coherent assemblage of sensory streams, neatly knitted together into a thread of consciousness, which we take for granted as an adult. The American philosopher and psychologist William James famously stated that the newborn infant perceives their new world ‘as one great blooming, buzzing confusion’.
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When you think about it, it’s no wonder they cry.

In spite of this sensory chaos, newborns are attracted to and can respond to sound patterns that already make a degree of sense to them, and we have just seen how they remember sensory experiences from their time in the womb, particularly ones involving sound.