Can babies recognize sad songs?

PROVO — Babies know "sad songs say so much" before they can walk or talk, according to musical experiments performed at Brigham Young University.

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.

"My wife tells me, 'Shh! People can hear you!"' Flom said.

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.