Abstract
The musical brain is built over time through experience with a multitude of sounds in the auditory environment. However, learning the melodies, timbres, and rhythms unique to the music and language of one’s culture begins already within the mother’s womb during the third trimester of human development. We review evidence that the intrauterine auditory environment plays a key role in shaping later auditory development and musical preferences. We describe evidence that externally and internally generated sounds influence the developing fetus, and argue that such prenatal auditory experience may set the trajectory for the development of the musical mind.
Highlights
LINKING PRENATAL EXPERIENCE TO THE EMERGING MUSICAL MIND Early experience lays the foundations for the developing musical mind
The importance of prosody is implicated by the finding that newborns differentiate between novel, low-pass filtered samples of two languages belonging to contrasting rhythmic classes and they confuse contrasting languages that belong to the same rhythmic
It is not until 4 or 5 months of age that infants begin to discriminate recordings of their own language from a rhythmically similar foreign language (i.e., English versus Dutch). This evidence suggests that newborns perceive rhythmic features of speech at the earliest stages of development. These early auditory preferences may have important implications for later learning and social development—by 5 months, infants gaze longer at people who speak their native language compared to people who speak a different language or people who speak their native language with a foreign accent (Kinzler et al, 2007)
Summary
LINKING PRENATAL EXPERIENCE TO THE EMERGING MUSICAL MIND Early experience lays the foundations for the developing musical mind. No studies have systematically examined whether specific maternal heart rates or beat ratios predict newborn listening preferences.
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