Youth Music - BongoClub.org.uk

Dr Alexandra Lamont is the Publicity Officer of the Society for Education, Music and Psychology Research (SEMPRE) and a member of the European Society for the Cognitive Sciences of Music (ESCOM).  She is an associate editor of the journal Psychology of Music, and a member of the translators' panel for Musicae Scientiae.  She has organised music psychology conferences in the UK at Keele and at Leicester, and served on the scientific advisory board of the 7th International Conference for Music Perception and Cognition. We asked her to explain the effects of music during pregnancy and socially in the development of children.

YM: At what stage of pregnancy is the foetus able to differentiate sounds?
Dr Lamont: It’s quite difficult to pinpoint this precisely because it is technically very complicated to study babies in the womb, but we do know that about 30 weeks into pregnancy babies are actually able to give fairly consistent different responses to different types of sound. They will be able to respond to familiar sounds and hear patterns of sound such as music. Some research has suggested that this might happen a little earlier than that, but 30 weeks is about the most reliable consensus date.

YM: Are there particular types of sound that are more soothing than others?
Dr Lamont: There hasn’t been a great deal of research at that level. We know low frequency sounds travel better into the womb because of the physics of it. In terms of what the baby can hear when it’s played a piece of music, the low frequencies will be audible. That’s not to say that they won’t be able to hear the melody in a piece of classical music – that’s perfectly possible. The way the sound travels, lower frequencies are better heard.

The baby’s response is more about familiarity that anything else. It doesn’t seem to matter what types of sounds or music are being played or heard, if something is repeated it does tend to become quite a soothing stimulus. It could be quite loud and fast music (not so loud that it’s damaging) for example, but if it’s repeated, the foetus will get used to that repeated exposure and actually become calm.

It’s also partly related to how the mother is feeling at the time, the most experience I’ve had in this area was as part of the BBC’s Child of Our Time project. The mothers were asked to choose pieces of music to play to their babies before they were born and I went back and tested whether the babies could remember the music 12 months later.

YM: Did they?
Dr Lamont: I did find significant preferences for the music that the babies had been exposed to. What I did in order to find this out was to pick a piece of music that was very similar to the piece that the mother had chose; for instance we had a family who had chose Vivaldi’s ‘Four Seasons’ the first one and I picked another Vilvadi spring piece in the same key, instruments, completely the same feel to it – but actually a different piece of music so the structure and melodies were different, the harmonic stuff is slightly different, but in the same key because we actually know that babies can tell the difference between different keys very early on, they’ll notice when something’s transposed. These two pieces of music were played one at a time but in the same session from two different locations and the baby has to look at one of the locations to make the music play until they are controlling how much exposure they get to one piece or the other. All of the babies in the study preferred to listen to the piece of music that they’d been exposed to, compared to the other very similar piece of music. It was more marked if the music was loud and fast… perhaps because it’s more captivating for them when they’re one rather than to do with it being more memorable for them before they’re born. At 12 months, babies like louder, faster music anyway so they are going to pay more attention to it. But it is consistent; there is a preference all those months later for music that has been heard before birth.

In other research I’ve done, we’ve looked at whether the music will calm the baby more immediately after birth. The thing is, the way that these studies are often done, the mother will be asked to relax while putting on the music, so when they’re giving ore-natal exposure to a piece of music they are themselves also relaxed and I think that’s also quite an important component in making those things associated with relaxation.

Imagine the mother sitting down on the sofa and putting in a nice piece of music – if it’s a piece that the mother has chosen then it’s likely to be quite calming anyway. If the mother feels relaxed while the music is playing, then hormonal things will be going on for the baby to. It will be getting the sounds plus lots of nice sensations from the mother as well – so it’s the two things together.

YM: How does the sound of the pregnant mother singing compare?
Dr Lamont: Two of the families in the project actually were singing the pieces that they had chosen to their children and they didn’t show any particularly different responses at 12 months. One of them was an opera singer and she picked a piece that she was rehearsing at the time, the other was a folk singer that sang a lullaby. They showed the same pattern of response as the others – it wasn’t more marked in those particular cases. It suggests that the same kind of experience is going on although it may be physically more engaging because the mother is actually making the sound while they are in the womb. However, it the same sense that this is music the mothers’ liked, had chosen and were using deliberately while they were relaxing and being calm.

YM: Is there evidence in 0-5s to suggest action songs help develop motor skills and their association with motor skills, language and instruction?
Dr Lamont: I’ve recently been doing a study with three and half year-olds looking at the kinds of music that these children are exposed to and the kind of music that they like. Children at that age are very keen on nursery rhymes and action songs. They prefer that kind of music to pop music largely speaking (this may explain the popularity of Bob the Builder), though pop music is also quite. There is some evidence that learning those songs can help with co-ordination but I can’t think exactly what it is at this point

YM: What are the major psychological benefits of music to under 5s in their development?
Dr Lamont: One thing that is very important to say that that there is no real, hard evidence that playing any particular type of music will help brain development – and there’s lots of hype around this. There is some evidence that in adults, listening to Mozart can improve a very specific part of our IQ – the spatial temporal reasoning skills – so short term exposure, to Mozart particularly, tends to result in a short term improvement of spatial temporal reasoning, which is part of the IQ test. Hence it can be said that short term, listening to Mozart will lead to a short lasting jump in your IQ score – but that is the full extent of the evidence. This has been taken to assume that listening to thing like Mozart will be good for babies and for children in development. Some of the ideas have lead to pre-natal stimulation programmes – particularly in the US – you know ‘help your baby get a head start by playing music’ even before the babies are born. There isn’t any evidence that these same short-term improvements work at all in under 5s or any children.

What we do know is that learning to play a musical instrument can help children’s mental skills to some extent. There is a lot of research in the US with children aged three and four involved in the Head Start programmes, and they are disadvantaged children who are behind in their reading and thinking and mathematic skills. Involvement in music lessons, particularly learning the piano at the age of three and four can help them catch up with their peers. It can bring them up to the level they should be at, but that is all.  If you give those kinds of experiences to children who are at the right developmental level, then it doesn’t have that kind of effect.

I think it is important to recognise that although music is a very important part of children’s lives and a way of engaging children with things, simply playing music to children is not going to lead to any kind of beneficial improvement in any sense. And forcing children into music when they don’t like it can be detrimental, it can put them off music for life.

There are lots of positive things that music does for children in their early years and one of them is the emotional connections that adults can have with children, that children can have with each other and that children can have with music. The results of the survey with the three and a half year-olds showed that these children already had their favourite pieces of music. Some of the parents were saying, “We had to put this music on because otherwise he/she would have been screaming the place down”. Music is something that we have very strong allegiances to later in life, but it’s also something that’s very powerful in these early years. It’s not something that’s been studied much until recently.

We’re beginning to get a sense of how important music can be for children themselves and also for the children to engage with other people – for giving them an emotional outlet. Before they can really express emotion in other ways it allows emotional communication and sharing before they have the language skills or cognitive skills to be able to do those things in a more adult way. Also for bonding between parents and their siblings music can provide a focus for sharing.

In the recent research, we studied 35 children over a week of musical experiences, as well as getting them to do a keyboard study where they had to play different types of music and a personality test. This week of musical exposure data was incredibly rich and is taking a long time to process, but the early indication is that music is very prevalent in young children’s lives and that they choose it a lot. We tend to think that children under the age of 5 don’t have a lot of control over what they’re exposed to; that they’re not terribly autonomous before they go to school, but in the home they are choosing an awful lot of music and expressing strong opinions about music. Some parents are using music intelligently to regulate the way children feel during the day. Classical music is used a lot to calm children down. Some of the nurseries use classical music to get children go to sleep, then they’ll put on upbeat music when they want the children to run around. So music can be quite important in regulating the structure of the day.

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Interview: Trish Thomas