Babies, Children, Music and Movement

Movement and rhythm are a part of life from the very beginning. The unborn baby hears his mother's heart beat and the voices of his parents. Babies respond to these sounds with a reflex movement. As the baby continues to develop and grow the responses become more deliberate and rhythmic and are the first form of communication. This development continues through the early childhood years and beyond. How we move is influenced by the rhythms we hear and remember. What influences this remembering?

Parents all over the world naturally love to bounce and move to the beat when they sing to their infants. They use the natural rhythms of language and its rising and falling tonalities to communicate expressively to their little ones. Babies are bounced to chants and rhymes and rocked to lullabies. These early experiences that parents do naturally are important for later learning. These activities challenge the vestibular system which is in the inner ear and is responsible for our sense of balance. Rocking, rolling and bouncing activities to music are not only fun to do, but extremely important for the developing brain. Have you ever wondered why this is so important? Are music and movement somehow related?

Canadian researchers at McMaster University have gained some insights into what is happening in the brain when infants are bounced to the beat. When psychologists Trainor and Phillips-Silver studied how babies perceive music they found that movement was the key factor in helping wire the brain to hear rhythm. (Feeling the Beat: Movement Influences Infant Rhythm Perception, Jessica Phillips-Silver and Laurel J Trainor; Science, June 3, 2005). The seven month old infants who took part in the study showed decided preference for music that had accents added on the same beat on which they had been bounced. The infants consistently chose to listen longest to rhythm patterns that matched those patterns to which they had been physically bounced. The researchers concluded that the movement caused the babies to remember the rhythm differently.

When babies learn about their world they learn in a multi-sensory context. In all music and movement classes there is a special emphasis on learning through a range of sensory experiences. It is not surprising then that the researchers found that hearing the beat alone was not sufficient to form long term neural pathways. Watching someone else bounce to the music did not work. In the series of tests the babies picked out a rhythm only if they'd been moved to the beat while listening. Vision also wasn't necessary as blindfolded babies could pick out the rhythm too, as long as they were bounced.

Now the inter-dependence of the vestibular with the auditory doesn't mean that passive listening is bad or that continual bouncing is necessary, but it does suggest that interactive musical experiences where movement to the beat is deliberate and sustained will be beneficial for the child. So use your own natural musical instincts. Get up and move with your child to the beat, at every opportunity. Choose your musical instruments and recordings wisely to encourage active music making. You can be assured that you are making a difference.