I've Got Rhythm!

Bouncing your baby on your knee while singing a song is a great calming mechanism, but did you know that it also happens to be how babies learn to dance to the beat for the rest of their lives? Researchers at McMaster University in Ontario have found that music rhythm perception - the ability to hear the beat in music and move in time with it - is developed through experience during the first year of life.

In their study, they focused on how movement influences auditory development. The first experiment was a 'training session' for a group of 7 mo. old babies in which they listened to a two minute repetition of a rhythm pattern without accented beats. Half the infants were bounced on every second beat and half on every third beat. After the session, the rhythm pattern was played again, this time with accentuated beats. Each baby turned to the song of the rhythm pattern they had just experienced - the second or the third. Researchers concluded that the rhythm of the bouncing they experienced determined which musical pattern they later preferred.

A second experiment examined whether babies would watch another person bouncing to the beat and develop a preference of their own based on that observation. They did not, which indicates their own body movement was essential for the development of their listening preferences - they had to 'experience' it rather than watch. These studies reveal that there is a strong multisensory connection between our ability to hear rhythms and to move our bodies in time to those rhythms. Integrating these senses - learning to use both the experience of movement and hearing it simultaneously and to let each inform the other - is one of the many essential developmental achievements of the first year of life.

Your baby's delight in being bounced and hearing music is not only fun, but yet another expeience that encourages healthy development!

Source: Science 308 (2005): 1430 (b.a.b.y. magazine)