Sound and music can cross barriers to communicate love, connection and comfort to infants during gestation. Babies have been observed to prefer stories, rhymes, music and poems heard before birth.
by Daniel Kobialka, D.M.A.
Sound and music have been observed to affect prenatal behavior. Whether it's formal experiments, clinical observations, first person reports or parental anecdotes, similar conclusions are reached in each instance.
Now connections are being made between sound, music, and prenatal learning. In nature, a dramatic observation has been made: song birds hatched by silent mothers can't sing. To understand how human babies learn in utero, we need to understand a bit about sound and how the ear develops in the fetus.
The baby's sense of hearing is probably the most developed sense before birth. The ear appears during the 3rd week of gestation, and doesn't become functional until the 16th week. By the 24th week, the fetus is actively listening. But even before the ear is complete, the fetus hears and responds to a sound pulse, which we know from ultrasound observations.
Most formal sound stimulation programs aren't begun until the third trimester because it isn't until then that cochlear structures are functioning and mature synapses are found. However, four month old fetuses respond dramatically to loud music: their heartbeats speed up.
The fetus responds first to lower frequencies and then to higher ones, with the mother's voice being the least distorted and higher frequencies in particular being more muffled. The sounds of a mother's heartbeat and voice are at least partially "heard" by her baby by way of bone conduction.
But reacting and learning are two different things; how do we know that babies learn, or remember, sounds heard in utero? According to Giselle Whitwell in her article, The Importance of Prenatal Sound and Music:
"The elements of music, namely tonal pitch, timbre, intensity and rhythm, are also elements used in speaking a language. For this reason, music prepares the ear, body and brain to listen to, integrate and produce language sounds."
Babies' reactions after birth to both new sounds and ones heard during gestation reveal that they prefer stories, rhymes and poems heard before birth, and music that was accompanied by a period of rest and attentiveness by their mothers during gestation evokes the same response from babies after they are born.
In 1994, William Sallenbach studied his own daughter's behavior and development from 32 to 34 weeks gestation. (The full report of his findings is available on this website in Life Before Birth/Early Parenting.) Sallenbach was the first to observe differentiation between sounds in prenatal development. The prenate's hand movements were gentle in response to a particular piece of music, but when a particular musical arrangement included dissonance, the infant's reactions were more rhythmic with rolling movements. Other studies have shown that a fetus responds rhythmically to rhythmic taps on the mother's belly.
In postnatal intensive care units, mothers are often not able to hold their infants as much as they'd like, so they are encouraged to speak to their babies, not simply because infants respond to interaction, but because their mothers' voices are the most familiar sounds to them. Mothers with babies in distress due to medical complications have found that sounds and music that the infant heard while in utero are the most soothing to them after birth and sometimes are the only way they can be calmed, proving once again that sound and music can cross barriers to communicate love, connection and comfort.
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