‘Part of our biological toolkit’: newborn babies can anticipate rhythm in music, researchers find | Science

Newborns can anticipate the rhythm of pieces of music, researchers have found, offering insight into a fundamental human trait.

Babies in the womb start responding to music around eight or nine months, as shown by changes in their heart rates and body movements, said Dr. Roberta Bianco, the first author of the research based at the Italian Institute of Technology in Rome.

“Previous research has also shown that some aspects of musical memory can be passed from the womb to birth,” she added.

However, it was difficult to know how well different aspects of music were handled by such young minds. The study highlights this point, suggesting that newborns can detect and predict patterns related to rhythm, but not melody.

Bianco said previous studies suggested that macaque monkeys also showed greater sensitivity to rhythmic patterns than melodic patterns.

“Rhythm appears to rely on very ancient hearing abilities that we share with other primates, while melody appears to depend on specializations of the human brain shaped by learning after birth,” Bianco said.

“In other words, rhythm may be part of our biological toolbox, while melody is something we grow into. [may] help explain why melodies vary so much across cultures, while rhythm tends to follow more universal patterns.

Writing in the journal Plos Biology, Bianco and colleagues describe how they used electroencephalography (EEG) to collect data on the brain activity of sleeping newborns fitted with headphones.

The babies played, in random order, original pieces of music composed by Bach, as well as versions where the pitches and timings of the notes were mixed.

Bianco said the team used computer models to estimate how surprising each note in a piece was based on the music’s previous rhythmic or melodic structure.

They then analyzed the EEG signals of 49 newborns to see if the surprises were reflected in their brain activity.

The team found that this was indeed the case for the rhythmic surprises in the original pieces, suggesting that babies can follow and predict the rhythmic patterns of real music. However, the melodic surprises were not reflected in brain activity.

Additionally, the newborns’ brain activity did not reflect surprises in terms of rhythm or melody in the mixed music.

Bianco said: “Since the order of pitches and time intervals have been randomized within a room, the brain cannot extract regularities on which to build expectations. »

Bianco said the results suggested that the human brain was biologically tuned to make predictions when listening to music, particularly about rhythm.

“Importantly, these predictions go beyond simply anticipating a regular interval: they involve detecting patterns in the music and learning how those patterns unfold over time,” she added.

Bianco said such abilities in newborns likely have their roots in very basic biological and sensory experiences. “Before birth, the fetal environment is dominated by regular rhythms, such as the mother’s heartbeat and the repeated movements associated with her walking,” she said, noting that such rhythms can provide the brain with an early sense of timing and predictability.

Dr Giovanni Di Liberto of Trinity College Dublin, who was not involved in the work, praised the study but said it did not fully take into account whether mothers played music to their babies before they were born, although he said the study opened up the possibility of investigating this issue.

Bianco noted that babies could hear music in the womb during the last trimester, adding that although the melodies were distorted, the rhythmic structure remained relatively intact.

Professor Usha Goswami of the University of Cambridge said the study’s findings were consistent with her own work with infants, suggesting that language acquisition begins with the rhythm of speech.

“Individual differences in children’s speech processing appear to depend on perception of speech rhythm and not perception of tone structure, and this paper also offers an evolutionary perspective on this,” she said.