![]() ![]() Cotton-top tamarins, another primate species, do not prefer consonant chords over dissonant ones. The preference for consonant sounds is independent of infants’ specific prenatal or postnatal experiences, suggesting that infants possess a biological preparedness that makes consonance perceptually more attractive.Ĭross-species findings add evidence to the evolutionary origins of musical appreciation. Preverbal human infants, including newborns with normal hearing born to deaf parents, show a preference for consonant chords and music. Consonance in music refers to a harmonious and pleasant perception facilitated by constant structural regularities, whereas dissonant music is clashing sounds that lack harmony and regularity. The other aspect of music appreciation is our liking for one certain type of music over another. It also demonstrates the functioning of our neural system dealing with the processing of emotions that allows us to appreciate music. The findings illustrate human capacity to detect the cues embedded in melodies that carry musical emotions. One study showed that African listeners have no difficulty recognising happy, sad and fearful emotions expressed in Western music irrespective of their own musical culture. Interestingly, our ability to express and recognise basic emotions conveyed in music tends to be universal. They also prefer their own mothers’ singing to speech, perhaps because such singing is more engaging. Indeed, they prefer infant-directed, affective speech over speech without emotions. These experiences may guide infants’ preferences. Even the way parents speak to their children (infant-directed speech) is often song-like. For example, parents sing affectively to their infants. Children are exposed to musical emotions in a number of ways. Part of the power of music is the range of emotions that it can express. Not only can infants distinguish between and remember different pieces of music, but their music appreciation appears to be, once again, somewhat innate. The two aspects involved in this are the perception of music emotion, and our liking for particular music - otherwise known as music appreciation. This means that young infants may have difficulty recognising some of the structural features of a musical piece. When experimenters adjust the tempo or timbre of the original music to a certain level, infants appear to be treating the adjusted music as if it is new information. However, their musical memory is not without limit. There were no changes when other non-familiar melodies were played.Īt six months, infants are able to recall the surface characteristics of a melody that they were familiarised with a week before, such as the specific tempo (the speed) and timbre (the tone quality). These changes indicated recognition of the old piece of music they heard in the womb. After being exposed to a short melody in the last weeks of gestation, young infants showed heart rate changes six weeks after birth when they were presented with the same melody. Newborn infants’ brains can identify beat disruptions, suggesting that human beat induction and perception is innate.Īmazingly, infants are able to form memories of music even before birth. Many believe music originates from humans’ ability to detect beat, a regular pulse in an auditory signal. This is because one of the most important elements across all types of music is the beat. It’s often said that the drummer holds the band together. So how does exposure change infants’ musical taste and expertise? To understand this question, it is important to distinguish between two concepts: music discrimination (how music is perceived) and music appreciation (our personal taste in music). However, at least some parts of our music sensitivity and discrimination ability may well be innate. Now it appears that an infant’s exposure to music may be as important as their exposure to language. Recent research has begun to look at the effects of music across cognitive fields in early development. Along with played music, parent-infant interactions and communications are often song-like, associated with attention-grabbing shifts in tempo and affective melodic intonations. It is perhaps not so surprising that our music sensitivity is present in infancy in the modern era, children are almost constantly accompanied by musical input from their surroundings. Music activities - listening, singing, playing or dancing - deliver positive effects in our lives in the cognitive, social and personal domains, as well as influence our early childhood development. ![]()
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