The Mozart effect and pregnancy: what does science say?
Will listening to Mozart's music during pregnancy give your child above-average intelligence? Where did the Mozart Effect become so popular, and what does science say about it at the moment? How does a child's hearing and musical sensitivity to sounds develop in the prenatal period? Find out the answers to these questions and find out why exposure to sounds such as your parents' voice and music is important to your baby's development.
The history of the Mozart Effect's popularity began in 1993, when three scientists from the University of California in Irvine published a study on the influence of music on the performance of tasks on the known intelligence scale (Rauscher, Shaw, & Ky, 1993). The researchers divided the students into three groups. Each group waited 10 minutes for tasks to be completed under different conditions. The first group listened Sonatas for two pianos Mozart's D major, KV 448, the second group listened to the verbal instructions on hypnosis, and the third group waited in silence.
The Mozart Effect: Truth or Myth?
The results of this experiment turned out to be very optimistic. They indicated that the respondents who listened to the Mozart sonata achieved on average 8-9 points higher on tasks on the intelligence scale than people from the other two groups. No wonder that the phenomenon immediately aroused great interest and began to enjoy incredible popularity. Perhaps the strength of this popularity drowned out the further fate of research into the Mozart Effect - studies that failed to confirm the effect. The slogan, however, was carried and is still used for marketing purposes today. Meanwhile, according to scientific knowledge, it is true that music can have a myriad of beneficial "effects", but none of them can be attributed to the Mozart Effect in the development of a child.
Mozart effect - no, music - yes!
Citing the Mozart effect in relation to pregnancy most often boils down to the belief that just playing Mozart's music to a child will develop his intelligence. The problem is that such a claim is unsupported by research. Apart from the basic fact that Research on the Mozart effect was conducted in a group of students, not children waiting in their mothers' bellies for birth, the effect itself has not been scientifically confirmed - especially in the context of general intelligence.
Expert advises
The research procedure involved checking the influence of music not on intelligence as such, but on a specific ability - solving visual-spatial tasks. In the next steps, the authors undertook research on the development of these abilities in a group of preschoolers, but they tested the impact not of just listening to music, but of active participation in music classes for 8 months. Another issue concerns the durability of the effect, which in the original studies was no more than 15 minutes. Researchers set out to see if repeated exposure to Mozart's music would enhance the effect and designed a new experiment. This time, the students for 5 consecutive days either listened to Mozart's music before performing tasks on the intelligence scale, or waited for tasks in silence. It turned out that at the end of the study, the results of students from both groups did not differ significantly. Moreover, when replacing tasks with ones that examined memory, the Mozart effect was not observed at all (Raucher et al., 1994).
The results of numerous subsequent studies conducted by various teams of scientists also did not bring clear results. It was shown, inter alia, by meta-analysis by scientists from the University of Vienna, who included more than 40 studies from the 16 years since the publication of the article on the Mozart effect (Pietsching, Voracek, & Formann, 2010). Eventually, many scientific works questioned the effect (eg Chabris, 1999; Črnčec, Wilson, and Prior, 2006), and even called it a "scientific legend" (Bangerter, Heath, 2004). The myth of the effect does not, however, diminish the enormous importance that classical music and other genres of music have for a child's development!
Musical from birth
It is known from research that just after birth, children not only recognize and distinguish their mother's voice, but also songs sung to them by their mother and father beforehand, and music played (Mazokopaki, Kugiumutzakis, 2009; Provasi, Anderson, Barbru-Roth, 2014). What's more - babies are born with certain musical abilities, for example, they can perceive rhythmic patterns or melodic lines of music, they can detect disturbances in the rhythm and changes in the pace of music (Trehub, 2003; Provasi, Anderson, & Barbru Roth, 2014). Children, like adults, calm down to soft music and come to life with faster and stimulating music. Babies aged 3-4 months move their hands and feet to the rhythm of the music they hear and modulate their vocalizations in response to the music (Fujii, et al., 2014).
What do babies hear in mom's belly?
The musicality of the youngest has its origins in the prenatal period, which is why researchers dealing with the sensitivity of young children to sounds and their rhythm joke that the mother's womb is the first concert hall, and babies are born musicians (Gratier, Trevarthen, 2007). The intrauterine environment is extremely rich in noises. Quite quiet sounds come from within, related to the child's own movement and to the vital body of the mother: the sound of her blood, the rhythm of the heartbeat and the rhythm of her breathing. On the other hand, the sounds of the surrounding world reach from the outside, among which the voices of mom and dad as well as music are extremely important (Provasi, Anderson, Barbru Roth, 2014). All these sounds make up a real cacophony of sounds! The readiness to and the way of reacting to them develops gradually along with the successive stages of the baby's auditory system development.
How does a child's hearing develop?
This system begins to be ready to perform its functions between the 25th and 29th week of pregnancy (Hepper & Shahidullah, 1994; Graven & Browne, 2008). First, between weeks 25 and 27 of pregnancy, babies respond to lower tones, and then, from around week 29-31, to higher tones. Sensitivity to sounds from the outside world, which researchers infer based on the baby's responses to heart rate changes and body movements, matures quickly between 24 and 35 weeks of pregnancy. The sounds of speech and music reaching babies are changed by the abdominal wall and amniotic fluid, but in the last trimester of pregnancy babies are able to hear these sounds well. From 32-34 weeks of pregnancy, they clearly respond to their mother's voice and learn its sound and rhythm. Since then, they also remember the melodies and songs sung by their parents and the music they hear (Graven, Browne, 2008; Provasi, Anderson, & Barbru-Roth, 2014). British researchers (James, Spencer, and Stepsis, 2002) conducted an experiment in which, in the last days before birth, for 4 hours, they repeatedly played to children Little Brown Jug Glenn Miller. It turned out that in the fourth hour of the examination, the little ones began to react to this track - they became noticeably lively (greater heart rate variability and more frequent changes in the state of activity). Moreover, when they were turned back on Little Brown Jug between the 3rd and 5th day after birth - they reacted similarly and while listening, they maintained a state of quiet wakefulness for a longer time.
Why are the parents' melodic voice and music important?
The described innate abilities of children and their sensitivity to the sound of speech and its melody and to music begin to develop in the third trimester of pregnancy, along with the development of the auditory system. This system is composed of many anatomical structures and their connections. Its maturation and specialization requires appropriate auditory experience (Graven, Browne, 2008). Research using functional magnetic resonance imaging - in which children at the last stage of their prenatal period were played with melodies played on a guitar or lullabies sung by their mothers - showed how many areas of the brain are activated when listening to music (Chorna et al., 2019). It would be more difficult for children to specialize in recognizing the melodies of human speech or the rhythms of music if they had not yet heard them during pregnancy. Researchers believe that depriving a child of such experiences may delay the development of the musicality that underlies communication with parents and speech development (Graven & Browne, 2008).
Expert advises
Permanent, repeated prenatal exposure of a baby to sounds and noises that are too loud and overburden his delicate auditory system can also have negative effects. For this reason, for example, it is recommended to limit the volume level in neonatal intensive care units, and pregnant mothers are strongly discouraged from practices such as wearing headphones with music on their stomachs (Graven & Browne, 2008; Chorna et al., 2019). The speech of mom and dad, as well as their singing or listening to music together, is extremely valuable.
How do we talk to the child?
Music and melodic sounds are present in the contact of parents and toddlers from the earliest stages of their lives in every known culture. Parents intuitively sing to their children, and babies are clearly curious and content to hear sounds with rhythmic and musical characteristics. Little children love the so-called parental speech directed to the child. Parents intuitively speak to their children more slowly, with short phrases, use many rhythmic repetitions of sentences, words or syllables and their intonation. The speech addressed to the child is dominated by vowels, which parents singly lengthen, melodically modulating the voice (Bullowa, 2010). This soft-sounding speech performs extremely important functions: it attracts the attention of little ones, soothes them and gives them a sense of safe closeness, but also makes it easier for them to understand and share pre-word meanings with their parents. Over time, it helps to distinguish words and phrases from the sound stream (Papoušek, 2007).
Not only Mozart and the classics
What about classical music? Her the advantage is the undeniable compositional and aesthetic value. As noted by Bartel and Cameron (2007, p. 25), classical music is "exciting, full of surprises, opens the hearing to a wide range of sounds," allowing you to plunge into the richness of culture and musical traditions. At the same time, the authors emphasize that despite the indisputable advantages of classical music in shaping the perception of sounds and their diversity, it is equally valuable to familiarize children with various other musical styles. It can be just as valuable to listen to genres such as jazz, rock, country, pop or reggae. Children are sensitive to the mood brought by music, and each musical genre opens up to many shades of emotion. Playing music together, dancing and learning about music from the earliest stages of a baby's life is also an opportunity for great fun: creative, based on reciprocity, joy, closeness and sharing rhythms.
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