Music during Pregnancy Longridge
Music during Pregnancy
Dr Alexandra Lamont of the Society for Education, Music and Psychology Research (SEMPRE) explains the effects of music during pregnancy and socially in the development of children. The interview is re-published with permission of BongoClub .
BongoClub : At what stage of pregnancy is the foetus able to differentiate sounds?
Dr Lamont: It’s difficult to pinpoint this precisely because it is technically complicated to study babies in the womb, but we do know that about 30 weeks into pregnancy babies are able to give fairly consistent 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, but 30 weeks is the most reliable consensus date.
BC : 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 baby’s response is more about familiarity than 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.
BC : Did they?
Dr Lamont: I did find significant preferences for the music that the babies had been exposed to. I picked a piece of music that was similar to the piece the mother had chosen. For instance we had a family who had chosen Vivaldi’s Four Seasons and I picked another Vilvadi piece with the same feel to it - even in the same key because we actually know that babies can tell the difference between different keys very early on. 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 in the womb.
In other research I’ve done, we’ve looked at whethe...
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