ASA PRESSROOM

143rd ASA Meeting, Pittsburgh, PA


[ Lay Language Paper Index | Press Room ]


Babies Can Un-Ravel Complex Music


Beatriz Ilari1, Linda Polka2 & Eugenia Costa-Giomi1 -beatriz.ilari@mail.mcgill.ca
McGill University, Montreal, Canada
Faculty of Music1, School of Communication Sciences and Disorders2

Popular version of paper 4pSC8
Presented Thursday afternoon, June 6, 2002
143rd ASA Meeting, Pittsburgh, PA


Babies are great listeners. Hours from birth, a newborn can tell his mother's voice from that of another woman. By about 4 months of age, a baby smiles and shows recognition of his own name. Babies between 8 and 9 months of age can remember words from a story1 or a simple piece of music2 that they heard previously, even after a two-week delay.

Taken together, these findings confirm that babies are highly attentive to the acoustical environment that surrounds them. With respect to music, researchers have not explored infant perception of music that is considered complicated by musical standards. This bias falls in line with the advice of music educators who often recommend simple music for the infant ear. Our finding that infants can remember a piece of complex music over a 2-week delay appears to challenge this implicit assumption that infants are ill-equipped to handle complex music.

To investigate whether babies can remember complex music, we exposed a group of 8-month-old infants to one of two piano pieces, Forlane or Prelude, from the composition "Le Tombeau de Couperin" by Maurice Ravel (1875-1937). Musicians agree that this work is complicated due to its intricate harmonies, complex rhythmic motives and textures (see excerpts below). The parents of each child were given a CD recording of either the Forlane or Prelude movement and were asked to play the assigned piece three times daily for the baby for ten consecutive days. Parents also completed a diary to document listening date, time and infant mood. Diaries and CDs were collected at the end of the prescribed listening period. Babies were brought to the university lab for testing two weeks following the CD collection date.

In the lab, we tested each baby to see if they had a listening preference for one of the two piano pieces using the Headturn Preference Procedure3 (see illustration below).

The Headturn Preference Procedure

During testing, the baby was seated comfortably on a parent's lap in a three-wall pegboard booth. The test consisted of listening to 16 twenty-second excerpts of music: 8 from the familiar piece mixed with 8 from the unfamiliar one. The baby was attracted by two red lights, one mounted to each side of the panel. One light would blink, either to the left or the right side of the baby. Once the baby looked at the light, one musical excerpt would come on through a hidden loudspeaker that was mounted behind the light. The excerpt would keep on playing until the baby turned his head away, in another direction. Listening times were recorded for each excerpt and added up for each piece.

Our results showed that these infants displayed a preference for the piano piece they heard. Babies exposed to the Forlane preferred to listen to it over the Prelude and likewise, babies exposed to the Prelude piece preferred it over the Forlane. We also tested a second group of babies who had never heard either piece of music. These babies showed no preferences for either piece of music. Taken together, these results show that babies had formed an impression of the piano piece and were able to retain this impression over a 2-week delay.

To better understand whether complicated music is harder for babies to remember than simple music, we compared our results with those found in a previous study that used the same design and infants of the same age to see if infants could remember a simple Mozart piece. This comparison shows that the preference effect (the difference in listening time to the familiar versus the unfamiliar piece) is stronger for more simple music. Thus, simple music may still be easier for babies to encode than complicated music. Yet, babies were able to learn with both simple and complex music. We don't know what information babies retained from their exposure to either simple or complex music; was it the melody, or some more global acoustic features of the music? This will require further systematic investigation.

In sum, our study provides further proof that babies are keen listeners, able to pick up and store information that is repeatedly presented in the acoustical environment that surrounds them. Evidence that infants can remember complex music is important for at least two reasons. Firstly, it helps us understand whether babies have limitations to process music; if there is in fact music that is appropriate for babies. Secondly, it is helpful for the elaboration of curriculum for early childhood education. There are many related questions to answer to fully address these general issues. What are the long-term effects of such learning? Do children remember the music they heard when they were babies? To what extent do musical experiences in infancy dictate people's later musical taste? While we attempt to answer these questions, keep in mind that your baby is also listening to that piano CD that you love so much. And learning. And remembering.

Main references:

1Jusczyk, P.W. & Hohne, E. A. (1997). Infants' memory for spoken words. Science, 277, 1984-1986.

2 Saffran, J.R., Loman, M.M., Robertson, R.R.W. (2000). Infant memory for musical experiences. Cognition, 77, B15-B23.

3 Kemler-Nelson, D.G., Jusczyk, P.W., Mandel, D.R., Myers, J., Turk, A., & Gerken, L. (1995). The head-turn preference procedure for testing auditory perception. Infant Behavior and Development, 18, 111-116.

This paper will presented at the 143rd Meeting of the Acoustical Society of America on Thursday, June 6th at 1PM during session 4pSC - Speech Communication and Psychological and Physiological Acoustics: Future of Infant Speech Perception Research: Session in Memory of Peter Jusczyk.

For further information, please contact : beatriz.ilari@mail.mcgill.ca