You Are the Music: How Music Reveals What it Means to be Human (3 page)

One of the consequences of the early development of hearing in humans, compared to other senses such as vision, is that babies are born primed with skills that they can use to learn about musical patterns in their environment. One of the most important is their sense of ‘the beat’.

Rhythms are perhaps the strongest and most coherent lowfrequency auditory messages that a foetus experiences regularly, hearing as they do the rhythms of speech, the rhythms of musical and environmental sounds, and the rhythm of their mother’s walk and heartbeat. One might suppose, therefore, that if we were to be born with any musical skills then we must be born with an idea of the beat. This appears to be the case.

In 2009, István Winkler and colleagues published a landmark paper called ‘Newborn infants detect the beat in music’.
¹⁰
They studied musical skill in infants that were only two to three days old – while they were asleep.

The researchers took advantage of a feature of our brain responses known as the ‘mismatch negativity’, or MMN, which is measured using electroencephalography, or EEG. An EEG scan measures the minute electrical activity across the scalp caused by brain activity, usually by means of a person wearing what looks like a shower cap covered in wires.

The MMN is a particular brain wave pattern that happens in response to a change in an otherwise consistent sequence of environmental events. MMN responses occur in all the senses but of course we are interested in sound. If you hear ten beeps of a certain note and the eleventh note changes, then your brain will give an MMN response. The MMN is the neural signature that your brain has spotted the ‘oddball’, the deviation in your expectation of what should come next. The interesting thing is that your brain will show an MMN response whether or not you are paying attention to the sounds – and this makes it an ideal brain response to study in sleeping babies.

Winkler and his colleagues used a specially adapted EEG system to measure MMN responses in newborns, smaller and more delicate than the adult version, accounting for infants’ fine skin and petite features. The researchers fitted the baby EEG and waited until the babies had a nice big meal and fell asleep.

Once the babies were sleeping, they were played sound sequences based on a typical rock drum accompaniment pattern, featuring a snare, bass and hi-hat. Occasionally the pattern missed a downbeat, the first strong beat of a unit of music, which adults hear as a rhythm break or a moment of strong syncopation. The dropped downbeat creates a rhythmic ‘oddball’. Would two- to three-day-old babies be aware of this oddball, and show an MMN response?

The answer is ‘yes’. Even when asleep the newborns gave an MMN reaction to the dropped beat. Importantly, this reaction wasn’t simply triggered by the missing note; dropped notes at non-rhythmic points did not trigger an MMN. This evidence shows that newborn babies can extract the beat from musical sequences. That is pretty impressive for a two-day-old brain, and strongly implies that infants are born with sensitivity for rhythmical sounds.

The researchers of this study suggest that newborns’ beat detection skills may have been learned partly because of hearing rhythms
in utero
and partly due to an innate drive. More specifically, newborns may apply their innate sensitivity for patterns in order to assemble rhythms and generate expectations in sound sequences. This makes them capable of basic beat induction, which, as we shall see in Chapter 6, is a skill missing in nearly all other animals on the planet.

Beat induction is an example of a basic music building block that is essential for later musical behaviours such as playing in synchrony and dancing, and which appears to be ready and willing to go right from the start of our lives.

Newborn name that tune

Newborns’ musical skills extend beyond detecting the beat to include sound discrimination based on features such as volume, duration and pitch.
¹¹
Not only this, newborns can discriminate between different contours, the equivalent to
spotting the difference between two melodies, and they can use this information when listening to speech.

Thiery Nazzi and colleagues
¹²
tested French newborns’ ability to discriminate between two lists of Japanese words that differed only in their contour, either going up or down. The researchers used a measurement technique that takes advantage of newborns’ natural inclination to suck. They gave them a special pacifier that measured every suck, noting its strength and time of occurrence. They started testing with 121 newborns but, as is often the case with infant research, they had a few drop-outs: 34 fell asleep (awww), fifteen rejected the special pacifier, seventeen committed the crime of ‘irregular or insufficient sucking’, and fifteen did not settle. That leaves us with 40 willing and able babies.

These 40 babies were played one of two word lists for a few minutes; one list contained words that went up in sound and one comprised words where the contour went down. During this familiarisation period the baby gets used to the sound and their sucking rate steadies to a consistent rate. Then half the babies – the experimental group – were played a different list while half – the control group – continued to hear the same list as before.

If the babies were capable of discriminating a change to the contour, it was predicted that their sucking rate would change – they would suck more as they became alert to and interested in the new sound. The control babies, who were hearing the same sound, were expected to continue on at a steady suck.

This is exactly what happened. The babies in the experimental group clearly noticed the change in the contour of the Japanese speech, the melody of the words, before they then settled down to a familiar sucking pattern again.

Importantly, all the babies in this study came from French-speaking homes, so it’s almost impossible that their
responses could have arisen from prior exposure to Japanese. This result shows newborns’ ability to not only spot differences in contour but to do so in unfamiliar speech, hinting at a flexible sound learning system that could potentially form an important basis for language development.

I mentioned earlier how the womb structure fosters the transmission of the musical aspects of speech as a result of the loss of higher frequencies (the speech detail). These musical aspects of speech include the pattern of contour stresses that we naturally use when we speak our native language. The study above shows that newborns can detect these contour changes in unfamiliar speech. Babies can also go one step beyond and use the familiar aspects of musical speech contour in their own vocalisations. It might even be the case that newborns cry in their native language.
¹³

Birgit Mampe and colleagues analysed the crying patterns of 30 French and 30 German newborns. They studied the ups and downs of their natural cries and it turns out that French babies produce more rising pitches, whereas German babies cry more with falling contours. The same patterns were revealed in intensity: volume went from low to high in French babies while the reverse was found in German babies. This difference between a rising and a falling sound mirrors the speech contours used by native adult speakers of French and German, respectively.

The study by Birgit Mampe suggests that babies can not only perceive and remember the musical patterns of the speech they hear
in utero
but that they also mimic these familiar patterns when making their first cries. This is probably the earliest evidence of the impact of our native language on our vocalisations – and it’s the musical features of communication that are the first to develop.

All of these studies support the idea that infants are born with a high level of sensitivity to the musical aspects of their
sonic world; the beats and the contours that they have heard so far in their young lives. In the next section we will see how this sensitivity is fed and developed by the uniquely musical world that our young inhabit.

Baby talk – music to their ears

When my best friend from school had her first baby I couldn’t wait to see pictures. She lives hundreds of miles from me now and I didn’t have time to make the long trip to see her, so I waited anxiously for an image of her bundle of joy. When I finally saw the photos I was overwhelmed with joy; Isobel was completely adorable, with her mum’s eyes too.

Then I started talking to the photo. ‘Aren’t you the most gorgeous little thing? Oh my goodness, look at you with your little hands and tiny fingers all tucked up! You are such a sweet little angel, just like your mummy, yes you are, yes you are …’ Thankfully, no one was in the room with me at the time. Not only was I talking to a photo; even stranger was the voice I was using to address the image.

My voice would start really low, then shoot up high through the words and rapidly back down again. I was speaking much faster than normal, apart from long, high-energy pauses on the start and end of phrases (‘yes’ and ‘are’). At some points I was almost squeaking the words.

I’m sure you recognise the phenomenon I’m describing – we have all either done this or heard it done. This kind of vocalisation is known colloquially as ‘motherese’ or more formally as infant directed speech (IDS), and it differs significantly from adult directed speech (ADS).

IDS has been reported in every known language tested to date.
¹⁴
IDS has basic sound features that make it unique: a higher fundamental frequency (basic pitch level), more intense and exaggerated contours and slides, and more repetitive and rhythmical elements. It’s also frequently accompanied by
rhythmic body movements to the beat of the speech sounds, like nodding or shaking the head, clapping or bouncing. If you spoke this way to an adult then they would likely view you with suspicion. So why do we speak this way to babies?

Here we encounter a chicken and egg problem. Who started doing IDS first, and why? There are two possibilities: either adults started to mimic the natural sounds that babies can make and found this to be beneficial, or babies were naturally drawn to more musical vocalisations that adults can make.

Like all evolutionary arguments, we will probably never solve this riddle to everyone’s satisfaction: all evidence for the origins of IDS is lost to the mists of time. However, finding an answer to this conundrum is not as crucial as the recognition that IDS suits both adults and babies for different reasons, and that this is probably why it still exists in all known forms of human culture.

Babies prefer to listen to IDS compared to ADS almost as soon as they are born (a strong preference emerges within one month),
¹⁵
irrespective of whether it’s spoken by a man or woman.
¹⁶
This preference for IDS has even been found in infants born to deaf parents.
¹⁷
IDS provides a reliable way for adults all over the world to trigger a positive reciprocal response from their young. It’s a method by which we can attract their attention and potentially modify their behaviour, at a developmental stage when verbally reasoning with a baby is tempting but largely pointless.

Another main advantage of IDS for adults is that we get a smile. When we speak to a baby in musical tones, we often get positive feedback that is, frankly, adorable. Their eyes widen, they wave their arms, blow bubbles, giggle and bounce their cute chubby little legs.

This happy response has the benefit that the baby is not crying. Scientific evidence shows that parents experience a release of stress hormones in the brain on hearing a baby
crying, resulting in an increased heartbeat, raised blood pressure and a cold sweat.
¹⁸
It’s extremely beneficial therefore to have a technique that can minimise these negative effects on our own physical state.

As much as a baby’s cry can be emotionally and physically distressing, once upon a time it was downright dangerous. A screaming baby would have been no good to our ancestors if they were trying to hide from predators or allow their community to get valuable rest in order to restore energy levels. As such, it’s an extremely useful survival skill to be able to create a state of calm in a baby by low-energy methods that require only our own voices.

In modern times this calming technique remains useful in situations where the baby’s natural response is not necessarily productive or desirable, such as when they must have a vaccination or try a new food. The use of IDS can distract a baby from responses that might be automatic and based on sound evolutionary survival principles, such as spitting out an unfamiliar taste, but which may not actually be beneficial for the baby – or the care-giver in the clean white shirt.

IDS for learning

I said before that the benefits of IDS were a two-way street, and that means there is something in this for babies too. In fact, when we look closely at the benefits we see that babies probably get directly useful input from musical IDS, and it may be that IDS has developed as a crucial learning tool for the preverbal stages of human life.

The first obvious benefit of IDS is that babies can respond to adults using these sounds. They can’t talk back to us yet but they can soon produce coos, pitch glides, and rhythmic responses. When we interact with babies they mimic our IDS, and in so doing the baby guarantees a safe and nurturing environment that is low-threat.

Research even suggests that a baby’s engaging behaviour in response to IDS can make them more attractive to adults who are not their parents.
¹⁹
A human baby can’t hope to survive without the help and support of adults therefore it’s in their interests to attract and maintain our attention, and to stimulate positive responses. When you are largely immobile, your voice is one of your best tools.

In learning how to mimic, babies also build one of their first communicative skills that will become valuable both in their behaviour and speech: the concept of turn-taking. You speak, and then I speak in response to your message. This way we form an understanding, we develop ideas and we effectively transmit information.