Autumn 2007

Early childhood education & care

Where do I begin?

Jeanne Cross offers her personal observation of a response to music by her unborn child and poses questions in an attempt to link this experience and the child’s musical intelligence fifteen years later.

In May, 1989, I attended a piano concerto at the Concert Hall at the Queensland Performing Arts Centre in Brisbane. It was entitled ‘Interspace’ and was composed by Toshi Ichiyanagi in 1987, and it was the premier performance for the composition in Australia. The pianist was Howard Shelley. Interspace was the first of two concertos played that evening.

Prior to attending the performance, I was apprehensive of what I was about to hear, having never heard a Japanese piano concerto. While I was prepared for the cultural novelty the piece would present to me, I was not prepared for the aesthetic response of my unborn son. I was into my thirty-eighth week of pregnancy, so he was very close to birth.

Within a very short time of the commencement of the concerto, which was exhibiting many of the Asian sounds of dissonance that Westerners are often unused to hearing, my unborn baby started moving—kicking, rolling—in a manner I had never before experienced. His movements were so agitated that it became very uncomfortable for me to sit still. I adjusted my position often and, although I managed to sit through to the end of the performance, it was clearly obvious that neither my son nor I had enjoyed it.

Once I’d walked into the foyer, his movements slowed, then ceased; during the second (traditionally Western) concerto, my baby was still; I knew he had fallen asleep.

Fifteen years following his birth, the experience is still fresh in my mind and my son has shown an above average level of musical intelligence. The questions that arise from my experience include:

To what extent do unborn babies prefer consonance to dissonance?

At what stage do they exhibit preferences for musical styles, or develop auditory skills to do so?

Is the preference innate, or is it a result of other antenatal experiences? Would a Japanese baby, for example, have reacted similarly?

Would a baby with a lower level of musical intelligence have reacted as violently?

There is a body of research supporting claims that babies hear music before they are born. ‘At the third trimester of pregnancy, the hearing apparatus starts to function, and the fetus becomes more reactive to … music’ (Ilari, 2003). Weinberger describes the womb as ‘the first concert hall’ and Tomatis (in Whitwell, 2004) notes that the ear is the ‘Rome of the body’ because almost all cranial nerves lead to it.

Zentner and Kagan (1998) conducted the major study concerning consonance/dissonance preference by young babies. The results of their study support the hypothesis of ‘an innate bias favouring consonance over dissonance’, but they caution that the nature of their study does not discount that the ‘more ambiguous forms of consonance and dissonance might be subject to a much stronger cultural impact’.

While there is an abundance of research supporting unborn babies’ audition and memory of music and other sounds, there is a dearth of research regarding fetuses’ reactions specifically to consonance and dissonance. There are numerous anecdotes regarding their reaction to loud external noise; for example, ‘mothers having to leave war movies and concerts because the auditory stimulus caused the fetus to become hyperactive‘(Whitwell, 2004) and psychologist Marian Shapiro’s recount of her unborn sons becoming seriously agitated while the choir, of which she was a member, and the orchestra were rehearsing the Verdi Requiem (Cook, 2002).

The cultural and social implications of my experience (and others similar to it) can be extended to include suggestions by Don Campbell (2000) that playing classical music, especially Mozart, to unborn babies will develop higher levels of intelligence and awaken creativity in the child. Direct implications would suggest that, for the comfort of the mother alone, it would be unwise to submit a near-term baby to sounds previously not experienced. If she hopes to expose her child to as many different cultures’ sounds as possible, it might be wiser to start the education earlier in the pregnancy, while the child’s auditory system is still developing. In that way, the baby could become more used to the dissonance often associated with Asian (and other cultures’) music.

From an educator’s perspective, children who have been exposed to other cultures, including their music, languages and customs, may have a broader general knowledge base on which teachers can build. Children with positive attitudes to ‘new’ sounds are more open to hearing the sound of non-Western instruments and may be more open to ideas that are not traditionally mainstream.

This is particularly pertinent for educators of very young children. A gradual introduction, over extended periods, to novel sounds and world music will allow time for their hearing apparatus and memories to become adjusted to the differences. This will allow their attitudes and perspectives to widen and appreciate sounds, music and cultures other than their own.

In our rapid move toward globalisation, children with attitudes that are open to different cultures and new ideas are tomorrow’s leaders. For the sake of my child, I am now glad that I persevered to the end of ‘Interspace’.

The question regarding the comparison of his reaction to that of other unborn babies’ is still unanswered. Such an answer would require long-term data collection and analysis, over a span of ten years or more. Correlations would need to be drawn between intra-uterine experiences of reactions to dissonance/consonance and measurements of musical intelligence through a child’s growth and development. While this study could potentially be fascinating for extremely patient researchers, it is beyond the scope of this article … other than to include its possibilities for the sake of education and the arts.

References

Campbell, D (2000). The Mozart Effect for Children, Hodder, Sydney.

Cook, G (2002). ‘Talking Back’, Boston Globe, Boston, Massachusetts, July 21, p.6.

Ilari, B (2003). ‘Music and Babies: A review of research with implications for music educators’, Applications of Research in Music Education, Spring–Summer, Vol. 21, no. 2.

Weinberger, N (1999), ‘Lessons of the Music Womb’, MuSICA Research Notes, Winter. Retrieved 28 June 2004 from www.musica.uci.edu/mrn/ V6I1W99.html#womb

Whitwell, G (2004). The Importance of Prenatal Sound and Music. Retrieved 28 June 2004 from www.birthpsychology.com/lifebefore/ sound1.html

Zentner, M & Kagan, J (1998). ‘Infants’ Perception of Consonance and Dissonance in Music’, Infant Behavior and Development, Vol. 21, No. 3, pp. 483–92.

Jeanne Cross is teaching at Tullawong State School, Caboolture, Queensland.

The author owns the copyright in this article. For information related to the reuse of this work in any form please contact the publisher denise.quinn@curriculum.edu.au