14 DAY TRIAL // Several previous studies have shown that music can influence an individual's health. A new research maintains that, all things considered, premature babies who find themselves in intensive care units might experience an improvement in their overall wellbeing should they be made to listen to live music.
The specialists who took the time to look into how music influences the health of newborn babies explain that, according to their investigations, live tunes are preferable to prerecorded ones.
From their standpoint, this is because the latter can also involve instruments, rhythms and sound effects that can cause the newborns to experience stress as a result of their brains being overstimulated.
More so given the fact that, prior to their coming out of their mothers' wombs, babies are pretty much kept safe from hectic sound patterns.
After exposing a total of 272 premature infants who all needed intensive care to live music, the researchers came to understand that the tunes they listened to helped the infants display better heart rates. My Health News Daily reports that the babies' sucking behavior, their sleep patterns and their caloric intake also benefited greatly from their being exposed to music in this manner.
By the looks of it, the live music played inside the intensive care units where these infants were helped also made it easier for their parents to bond with them and with each other.
“Live sounds are the key. When a music therapist teaches parents to entrain with the baby's vital signs, it can have a therapeutic effect,” argued specialist Joanne Loewy.
“Entraining means matching sounds or music to the meter of the infant’s breathing,” said researcher went on to add.
The infants who took part in this research were all made to listen to live music for a total of 10 minutes three times per week. The experiments were put an end to after a fortnight.
According to the same source, the three different types of music these infants were made to listen to were a so-called whoosh sound produced by an instrument, the sounds produced by a drum-like wooden box and a lullaby sang to them by their mother.
A detailed account of this research and its findings was published on April 15 in the scientific journal Pediatrics.