Even before learning to talk, infants can easily distinguish cheerful tunes from depressing compositions.
Even before learning to talk, infants can easily distinguish cheerful tunes from depressing compositions, a new classical music study has revealed.
In the study, 5-month-old babies were shown to pick out an upbeat tune, such as "Ode to Joy" from Beethoven’s Ninth Symphony, from a lineup of gloomier tunes.
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Such musical experiments, according to Ross Flom Brigham Young University psychology professor and study author, have offered another example of how babies make sense of the world long before they can talk.
"One of the first things babies understand communicatively is emotion, so for them the melody is the message. Our study showed that by nine months, babies are categorizing songs as happy or sad the same way that preschoolers and adults do," said Flom.
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First they displayed an emotionally-neutral face for the baby while music played. When the baby looked away from the face, the music stopped and the researchers queued up a new song from a playlist of five happy and five sad songs. For each song, observers recorded how long the baby paid attention to the face.
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"People of all ages reveal quite a bit through what they choose to look at and how much time they spend attending to that event. The only trick is to come up with the right presentation to test an idea about how and what babies learn," said Flom.
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"The happy songs were all in major keys with fairly short phrases or motives that repeated. 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," said Kenney.
Flom said that this period of learning about emotion in sounds is a natural step before learning to talk.
"Infants master so many things in such a short time frame. I can’t think of a better line of inquiry than how infants learn so much so quickly," Flom said.
The results of the musical study will be published in the upcoming issue of the academic journal Infant Behavior and Development.
Source-ANI
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