Pre- and (Way) Post-Natal Music
I am cleaning house with my son, which means listening to selections from his Ipod. He knows what I can’t stand by now. We do have some shared tastes, so he tries to go for those. Right now we’re listening to a band called Balkan Beat Box.
So, interspersed with dialogues like, “Mom. Can you tell me what this is?” “Throw it in the compost.” “Umm . . . I think you can . . .” I am hearing every possible permutation of the harmonic minor scale. For my son, that bluesy, middle-eastern-y sound means soul.
It is interesting, because when I was seven months pregnant, I tried an experiment. Every evening around the time I hope he would be falling asleep, I put myself into a relaxed state and sang the same lullaby. I picked the Yiddish song Raisins and Almonds.
My idea was that, once he was born, when I sang that song, he would realize that it was time to go to sleep.
It didn’t work. The hour at which I sang that song was the hour at which he wanted to party. And I never noticed him paying more attention to that song than any other.
But guess what scale Raisins and Almonds is based upon? Maybe the nightly lullaby had a bigger effect than I had realized.
We know that the sounds children hear in utero profoundly affect their sense of language, pitch, rhythm, and phonemes. Researchers have found that the cries of German newborns tended to have the falling cadence of German, whereas the cries of French newborns tended to rise – as does the cadence of French! (This, and lots more interesting research, is cited in the July/August 2010 Scientific American article Speaking in Tones by Diana Deutsch).
The nice thing is, mothers don’t have to do anything special to create musical babies – other than to sing, play, and immerse themselves in the kind of music they love, and want their babies to love. The caveat is that the music mustn’t be too loud or disturbing. The decibel level at which many people listen to music can be literally traumatic for the sensitive ears of babies.
Therefore, I don’t suggest putting a sound source right on the body – not even headphones. The fetus is in an aqueous medium, and sounds are amplified by water (what the baby hears can be four times louder than what you hear!) When babies are in utero, nature planned for them to hear sounds cushioned by air, lots of tissue, and amniotic fluid – plus the natural vibrations of the mother’s voice and body sounds. And these sounds are plenty loud for a gestating infant. Even sonograms can be disturbing - even traumatic - for them.
In general, trying too hard to improve upon nature can yield some questionable results. I remember five years ago seeing a baby who would not go to sleep. While pregnant, the mother had used one of those devices that supposedly enhance infant intelligence. It involves wearing a sort of belt that produces electronic signals. The effect of this, neurologically, seems to be that the baby does not shed the large numbers of neurons that are naturally pruned during pregnancy. So these babies may be born with more neurons than normal.
This mother was so proud of her precocious baby – but to me, it felt as if her little one couldn’t do the basics. Cuddle. Bond. Relate. Sleep. This baby had eyes like marbles.
Nature knows what it is doing, by pruning neurons. It seems to filter out the chaff and leave us with the kernel we need to become social beings. Too many neurons may not be a good thing; a recent study by the American Medical Association suggests that abnormally large numbers of neurons in the prefrontal cortex can be correlated with autism.
Back to the kitchen. The Ipod must be on shuffle, it's a straight-up rock song now. “Guess the guitarist!” my son challenges me.
“I’m so bad at this,” I protest; I feel hopelessly inadequate to unravel the electronic strands of sound.
“No, you’re not!” he insists.
I do my best. “It’s someone who listened to a lot of Jimi Hendrix.”
“Listen for the solo,” he says. “The solo always gives it away.”
I hear a high, suspended note that comes twisting down like a kite out of the sky, and pull a name from the depths of my unconscious. “Joe Satriani?”
“Right!” he says gleefully. “See - you can do it!”
From Raisins and Almonds to Chickenfoot . . . you never know where those first prenatal songs will take you.