14 DAY TRIAL // Experts investigating the behavior of babies have recently demonstrated that infants love a beat. According to the new research, small children tend to get up and dance, bouncing up and down every time they hear rhythms, but this does not happen when they hear speech. The results of the study could mean that infants are hardwired to dance, or at least move their bodies rhythmically to the beat. The work was conducted on about 120 children, all aged 5 to 24 months, LiveScience reports.
“Our research suggests that it is the beat rather than other features of the music, such as the melody, that produces the response in infants. We also found that the better the children were able to synchronize their movements with the music, the more they smiled,” says University of York psychologist and study researcher Marcel Zentner. These dispositions that children have were analyzed in a series of experiments. The participants were played either classical music, rhythmic beats, or adult speech, and all of their reactions were then recorded with video cameras.
The science team even called for the help of professional ballet dancers, whose job was to determine precisely how well the children matched their bodily movements to the beat. Each of the test subjects was sitting in a parent's lap, while the adult had headphones on so that he or she could not hear the music. The researchers noted that the children most often moved their hands, feet, torso and head in response to the rhythmic music, rather than speech. But what really puzzles the investigators is the fact that they have no clue whatsoever as to why this predisposition developed in our species.
“It remains to be understood why humans have developed this particular predisposition. One possibility is that it was a target of natural selection for music or that it has evolved for some other function that just happens to be relevant for music processing,” says Zentner. He is also a coauthor for a new paper detailing the findings, alongside colleague Tuomas Eerola, who is based at the University of Jyvaskyla Finnish Center of Excellence in Interdisciplinary Music Research. The two published their results in the March 15 issue of the respected publication Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences (PNAS).