Missouri Classical Music News and Notes

By using EEG recordings as well as special techniques based on behavioral response, researchers have now shown just how early the infant brain becomes musically active. By two months of age, babies can already exhibit preferences for consonant or dissonant music, and a study not yet published found that by eight months they can grasp the structure of unfamiliar Balinese scales while adults do not. Just when I thought Jonah was little more than a cute blob listening quietly in his baby seat, he was in fact doing some serious musical heavy-lifting. . . .

They compared infants' and adults' abilities to pick up on changes in both simple and complex rhythms in Bulgarian and Serbian folk music. North American adults, with little prior exposure to this music, grasped only the changes in the simple material and faired poorly with the complex folk rhythms. As for the diapered set, the babies aced both the simple rhythms and the complex rhythms.

Speaking by phone from the University of Nevada, Las Vegas, Hannon said this meant that infants start life with the ability to perceive complex rhythms but that they lose this skill unless it is called upon in their environment. Hannon was hesitant to make sweeping generalizations based on her research, so I'll do it instead. Clearly, if we want babies to retain the ability to perceive rhythmic complexity, they should be exposed to rhythmically complex music from a very early age.

Honing explained that we tend to think of advanced musical training as the only way to build real musical competence, but his work has demonstrated how much the brain can learn simply through active exposure to many different kinds of music. "More and more labs are showing that people have the sensitivity for skills that we thought were only expert skills," he said. "It turns out that mere exposure makes an enormous contribution to how musical competence develops. But it's the variety that counts."