Babies Learn Music While Sleeping( "The babies were presented with...)

"The babies were presented with sequences of sounds of different tone colour - different musical instruments, if you like - but all of the same pitch. Occasionally, you play a sound of a different pitch and watch the EEG to see if they produce a distinctive reaction to this deviant sound," explains Denham. Similar tests were done to see if babies were sensitive to rhythmic and melodic patterns, too.

Denham says while this sort of technique has been used for many years on adults to measure pre-conscious detection of unexpected events, it has seldom been used with newborns. The big advantage is that it can work even when somebody is unconscious. So the babies being asleep was not a problem.

Rocking in the cradle
The results were exciting, demonstrating newborns had a sense of pitch from birth, and this was not something learned through experience as had previously been thought. The experiments showed they are even sensitive to the beat in music.

"The bottom line is we come into the world with brains that are continually looking for patterns, and telling us when there is something unexpected we should learn about," says Denham.
István Winkler, who conducted the baby research, concludes this capability allows babies to learn about their environment and the important actors within it.

The discoveries may be applied to developing early screening techniques and treatments for cognitive hearing problems. The screening currently in use simply measures how hard of hearing people are as opposed to the nuances of their actual perceptions.

"Research is needed to determine the norm - and how much variation there is from it - to prevent false diagnoses when a baby is simply developing slowly," Denham says. But then it should be possible to spot defects at a very early stage and treat them while the brain is still malleable.

New light on music cognition
The research
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