Literacy news
Rock your baby if you want children with rhythm
3 Jun 2005
Parents who bounce their babies to a song and rock them to a lullaby are unwittingly helping their brains to appreciate music, scientists have discovered. The ability to feel the strong and weak beats in a rhythm allows people to move and dance in time to music. Now the corresponding way that movement shapes our appreciation of the complex structures of music has been revealed by a team at McMaster University in Hamilton, Ontario.
"The simultaneous experience of listening and moving to a rhythm wires the brain so that different senses work together," said Prof. Laurel Trainor, co-author of a paper published today in Science magazine. She has shown that the way seven-month-old infants interpret a rhythm is influenced by the way they are bounced to that beat.
"It has long been known that infants are attracted to music and responsive to its emotional content. Our findings provide evidence that the experience of body movement plays an important role in musical rhythm perception," she said. However, she stressed that parents should not blame themselves if their children are not musical. "The individual differences between people in musical ability probably stem from a combination of genetic and experiential effects," she said.
(Roger Highfield, Science Editor, The Daily Telegraph, 3 June 2005)
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