Can babies recognize sad songs?
By 9 months, babies categorize songs as happy or sad songs, in the way preschoolers and adults do — information that BYU psychology professor Ross Flom said will help researchers better understand child development.
"One of the first things babies understand is emotion," Flom said. That's important because emotion is a natural building block for speech.
"We all know that when you talk to infants, they don't understand the semantics, but they get the emotion," Flom said. "One of the first things they understand is the tone of our speech. So they learn to segment speech between what is happy and positive and what is sad and negative."
Happy speech is like happy music, more upbeat and with faster rhythms.
So how does a baby tell a professor she knows the difference between Beethoven's upbeat Ninth Symphony and his sorrowful Seventh?
That's an especially good question for Flom, whose mother forbade him from touching the family piano because his playing was more like noisemaking, and whose wife says he can't sing.
Flom and co-authors at Iowa State University and the University of Minnesota turned to a method that measures how long it takes for babies to get bored.
The researchers showed each baby an emotionally neutral face on a screen and played excerpts from three songs deemed happy tunes by preschoolers and adults without musical training.
All of the selections were instrumental. One of the happy tunes was the theme from "Peanuts."
When a baby got bored with the three happy excerpts played over and over again and turned away, the researchers switched to two sad pieces. The babies showed renewed interest in the music because they recognized it was different.
In the control group, instead of switching to sad songs, the researchers played two new happy songs. The babies did not renew their interest.
"They understood changes in tempo, pitch or mode," Flom said. "They pay attention to the global or more overall property of the music such as emotion."
By 9 months, babies can discriminate between individual musical examples.
The study will be published in the next issue of the academic journal Infant Behavior and Development.
"What we really wanted to know, what I'm really trying to unravel, is how is it babies can learn so much in such a short period of time," Flom said. "They are really good at picking up and discriminating between faces, voices and property in voices. We knew if you play a happy song to babies, they move more or are more active, and that if you play a lullaby, they become more calm.
"We thought, Maybe they can discriminate between different music? Lo and behold, they can."
A BYU music professor was delighted to learn of the findings.
"The happy songs were all in major keys with fairly short phrases or motives that repeated," Susan Kenney said in a university news release. "The tempo and melodic rhythms were faster than any of the sad selections, and the melodies had a general upward direction. Four of the sad songs were in minor keys, and all had a slower beat and long melodic rhythms.
"For an infant to notice those differences is fascinating."
E-mail: twalch@desnews.com
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