Betting rhythm, to paraphrase the late Johnny Cash, is not something we learn, but is “part of our biological toolkit.”
That’s according to researchers who played Bach to dozens of babies who appeared uncannily attuned to the Baroque-era composer’s piano virtuosity.
“Newborns come into the world already tuned in to rhythm,” according to the Italian Institute of Technology (IIT) in Rome, Italy.
“Even our tiniest two-day-old listeners can anticipate rhythmic patterns, revealing that some key elements of musical perception are wired from birth,” the team said.
The IIT teamed up the Research Center for Natural Sciences and Szent Imre Hospital in Budapest, Hungary, to play a mix of 10 original and four scrambled versions of Johann Sebastian Bach’s piano compositions to 49 sleeping newborns.
The babies’ reactions were tracked using electroencephalography, a “non-invasive technique in which electrodes are placed on the infants’ heads to measure their brain waves,” the team explained.
When brain waves showed signs of surprise, it meant the babies expected the song to go one way, but it went another, the researchers explain in a paper published in the journal PLOS Biology in February.
Not melody
While the tests showed babies have rhythm, the same cannot be said for other aspects of music.
The responses offered “no evidence that the newborns tracked melody or were surprised by unexpected melodic change,” the researchers found.
Melody, they said, is a “skill that comes at an unknown exact point later in development” and is likely “something we grow into.”
The team said that there were indications from previous research that unborn children’s heart rates and body movements change in response to music, but that newborns’ responses to rhythm and melody remained something of a mystery.
But the latest experiments provide “neurophysiological evidence that tracking rhythmic statistical regularities is a capacity present at birth,” the researchers said.
Babies can also categorise objects when two months old – far sooner in life than was previously thought, according to scientists at Queen’s University Belfast, Stanford University and Trinity College Dublin, who studied over 100 infants at two hospitals in the Irish capital.
“The foundations of visual cognition are already in place from very early on,” said Trinity’s Cliona O’Doherty, whose team’s research was published in the journal Nature Neuroscience. – dpa
