MUSIC TO THE EARS

Just as speech and gestures are part of our biological heritage, so is music and dance. While many of us, outside the trained, often think of music as something for the background or a dance party – music is actually a powerful tool when used with intention. Here are four ways to think about music alongside raising kids – in how we interact with music, make it, listen to it, and use it for specific reasons (like transitions).

INTERACT

There are many ways to interact with musical experiences. It was previously discussed that gestures enhance learning (simple sign language can be bucketed there). That’s where “Fingerplays” and footplays come in. Funny name, but it’s whenever the action of poems or songs are shown with gestures – hands or fingers, feet or toes – songs like The Wheels on the Bus or Itsy Bitsy Spider (also known as Incy Wincy Spider).

Inline with the pattern of human development, from near to far – babies learn about their hands and feet before they learn to control their fingers and toes. Clapping shows up between 6 – 9 months (mostly via imitation). Control of fingers and hands for true finger play might initially come online closer to 9 months, but it never hurts to start to explore music and play options – and it can start with the assist dancing or body play with songs like Head Shoulders Knees and Toes or Little Piggy Go To Market.

EXTRA: Explore the range from upbeat dancing and moving – and slow soft swaying. Songs that have ways to play within while holding the baby, such as “freeze songs” like Freeze Dance from the Kiboomers or songs that have fast and slow parts.

MAKE

Bang this, shake that – whao – it makes a sound. How cool! Making music at this age supports learning about associations as well as cause and effect. What better way than some hands on practice.

Below is a list of instruments that are great for kids around this time.

• Shakers/maracas – egg shaker vs handle will provide different grasping experiences.
• Tambourines – rattle, shake, bang, or ring
• Bells – front desk kind, shaker kinds – some bells are made to strap on an ankle or wrist to ring with limb movement.
• Drums – or pots and pans (might not be for everyone)
• Xylophone
• Steel Drums – beautiful sounds [YouTube, 4min 31sec]and many small ones now on the market. These are awesome to play on the lap vs floor/tabletop. The vibrations from the drum travel through the body and for some people this can be a very relaxing/soothing/meditative feeling. Sound is just vibration… and those good vibes can work wonders while creating wonder.

In your purchase decisions, consider natural materials (or DIY non-toxic), storage space, and quality (durability) in picking the sound makers. If picked thoughtfully, they will get used for 4-5 years with a much longer life. Quality instruments may cost a little more, so consider the balance between a “toy rattle” and a practical sound maker that live on long after interest drops.

The human body also has a few musical instruments. From beans, the magical fruit to a good armpit toot, we’ve got the beat box (continuing those raspberries and mouth sounds), singing, clapping, snapping, and humming. Humming songs is usually a third tier kind of sound, but it has a lot of novelty. It also turns out – for dad health – that closed mouth humming, in one study, produced 15x more nasal nitric oxide than quiet exhalation (note: you get ZERO nitric oxide from mouth breathing). Nitric oxide lowers blood pressure, improves the immune system, and regulates aspects of blood health. Learn More: [YouTube, 4min 34sec]

Instruments, as objects, also provide ways to have the baby look at visual stimuli both close and far away. Music time continues the development of vision.

LISTEN

If you have ever curated music to your own taste or gone through the ebbs and flows of the music cycles of life, then you already know the power of the right tunes at the right time. It’s estimated that there are around 97MM “officially” released mainstream songs, with 30MM tracked and tagged by entities like Pandora or Spotify. Of those, the average person, over their life, interacts with about 1,000 songs in any meaningful way and can remember them in detail.

Part of this is that music recommendation and discovery engines aren’t very sophisticated yet. And… having a child kicks open an entirely new door for music. From Elmo and Cookie Monster to Baby Shark to Kidz Bop (face palm)… so how do you navigate the early music?

Here are a few places to start.

Youtube, Pandora, Spotify all have a lot of kids songs, nursery rhymes, and lullabies that can be played fairly easily. There seems to be a song for just about any activity from waking up to cleaning up, to dressing, to brushing teeth, to going to bed. Asking Alexa or Google (politely) to play a kid song about XYZ will usually get something.

Super Simple Songs [Youtube, Spotify] is one of the most popular places for songs, including several holiday variants of well known songs.

Raffi [Youtube] is a wholesome artist that breathes new life into oldies while carrying a unique style in his own kids music through songs like Bananaphone.

Even Snoop Dogg went all in on a kids album [Spotify]

Of course, you don’t have to go full tilt on kids music. Share the music you love, while exploring some of the things that they might find delight in. You may even stumble across some of your favorite songs rewritten for kids (Beatles for Babies or Metallica for Babies) or an artist that took a detour into kid music land. If you fancied the 1995 hit Peaches by The Presidents of the United States of America, then you might find some familiarity in their late life pivot to Caspar Babypants, including adult enjoyable versions of songs like Ba Ba Black Sheep and Itsy Bitsy Spider, alongside many originals.

USE

Music can be extra powerful when used thoughtfully. Transitions are one area. Many babies, and even many adults, benefit from transitions out of one activity or situation and up into the next. Music can be a tool to lessen the challenge of difficult transitions – nap times, bed times, cleaning up, ending play, saying good morning, saying goodbye. While many songs exist for these events – making up songs with their names in them or adding their names to songs is another way to bring connection to the song, kid, and transition.

For Dad, having your own playlists on hand of feel-good music can give a boost in positive emotion to ramp up into doing some good work, or when a pick me up is needed – saving some energy on a stressful day. What’s your favorite feel good song?

There are so many aspects of music and early childhood that get underused, and with the language window open, there’s never been a better time to explore some new tunes and new moves.

When it comes to developing language via language exposure, it’s not just the words that matter – it’s the culmination of all sound experiences. This drives the ability to recognize similarities and differences between sounds – in language, music, and nature. This is called Auditory Discrimination and it appears that the quality of auditory experiences in the first 3 years of life affects children’s listening, singing, communication, and reading skills throughout their lives.

The baby brain is doing a lot of pattern recognition and trial/error prediction in this first year across all areas of development. With language, it’s easier to help that process by slowing down the language and segmenting out the words. With music, however, babies are on their own a bit more. Research indicates that babies can recognize music in the womb, that newborns can detect beats in music (explanation of Upbeat/Downbeat [YouTube, 5min 54sec]), and even prefer music they’ve moved in sync to. A study in 2005 showed that movement and music are connected even without need for visual input. Babies who moved in sync with music showed enhanced preference for that music vs music not moved to, or moved out of sync with. Music is meant to be a multisensory experience – even when the body is still and relaxed – it’s tied to the nervous system.

Calming music is an area of interest for babies (for obvious reasons). Research has shown that lullabies and soft songs do indeed calm not only the baby, but also the parent. An October 2020 study added evidence that lullabies in any language appear to relax babies. These underlying patterns of lullabies shows that the biological response of relaxing to relaxing music may not be tied as tightly to familiarity – at least in the first year of life.

A March 2020 study showed that familiar songs reduce infant distress more than unfamiliar songs and way more than infant-directed speech. So in searching for music and sounds that calm vs relax – if you find a lullaby or song you can sing that they seem to prefer – that may have more impact in those moments – at least until they change their preference.

When looking at music in the brain and body, the Mozart Effect usually comes up – the idea that listening to mozart makes you smarter. This theory came about in the early 1990’s and ignited an explosion of further research, especially in the field of babies. It turns out from nearly 30 years of follow-on research that it’s not exactly accurate. What research has refined is that music can and does shape us. There are many ways and many songs that can change our moods, change our blood pressure, and help “make us smarter” – or at least have a short boost in attention, if that counts as smarter.

Breakthroughs in the research fields in 2013 (via brain imaging) found that context often matters when it comes to music. While early researchers were initially looking for universal songs that had widespread human impact, it was later found that personal preferences should be a key consideration in most areas of music research – especially when it comes to boosting emotions to amp up or prime for physical activity or to help in lifting oneself from negative emotions or anxiety. There are, however, some general patterns in how music taps emotions (ref: lullaby relax vs calm example above). Emotions are shorter-lived experiences that create a coordinated change in thoughts, actions, and the physiology. Research supports the ties of music to emotions to change mind and body states – and possibly brighten attention to streamline learning.

A small 2015 study, involving 9 months babies listening to a waltz, showed that the musical experience enhanced their ability to process not only the music, but also speech. Said another way, the intentional exposure to rhythmic patterns in music improved the ability to understand rhythmic patterns in speech – like cross training!

While it’s still early in these fields though, and more research needs to be done, the one thing agreed upon is that movement and speech, dance and music – they are written into our biology. Sharing music with babies has a lot of advantages – even if we don’t know exact details of dose and frequency of exposure.

In addition to questions of dose and frequency – science knows a lot about intensity or volume. The World Health Organization (WHO) guidelines for continuous noise environments for adults have been set at 55 decibels. Decibels or dB is the unit in which sound intensity is measured. Long standing research on adults in loud areas found that the brain and the body are not able to fully rest when the sustained noise level is on average above 55dB during sleep. It disrupts memory consolidation in humans and keeps the nervous system from resting. It puts a load on the brain and the heart that can be damaging over years of exposure. Dose, intensity, frequency dictate the outcome. Being exposed to loud sounds briefly can have as much impact as medium sound exposure for several hours.

These types of studies have led to NICU levels for sound set at 50 decibels, as quality sleep and down time are needed for recovery and regeneration especially in preterm babies.

This insight can be used to balance the sound environment at home. For instance, most white noise machines available exceed the recommended threshold of 50-55 decibels suitable for the human exposure at night. No need to worry if you use them, just play with the sound level and machine location and experiment with the placement of the machine away from the crib or bed of the baby. You can download a free sound level app and measure the dB sound level where your babies head is for sleep.

But there is no reason to overly curate the sound environment. Some background noise can be good – so we learn to differentiate what’s important from what is not, but overly loud background sounds can disrupt or compete for concentration. A general rule of thumb for all of this – if it bothers YOU, it’s too loud for them.

In summary – exposure to a variety of music and sound is the name of the game. Help them find the patterns of meaning. Build music into routines where possible. Go far and wide – seek the novelty and bookmark those songs they (and you) seem to like. Build up a toolkit of music for specific uses for baby and yourself. Music and sound can be an effective tool for navigating challenging transitions – but are also great tools for bonding and fun!

This section has tidbits from around the web that are typically on Dads minds.

Shout Out To Fellow FD Dad and Creator: ANIL R

If you appreciate warm nod your head worthy selections of worldly music, soundcloud listen/bookmark here. You’ll find hints of ’80s, ’90s, French Touch, Baleric, Italo, Indie, Nudisco, Synthpop, Chillwave, R&B, Disco, some Vapor and just plain awesome vibes.

Shout Out To Fellow FD Dad and Creator: JOE G

When Joe and his wife had their first kid in 2019, they drew from their music backgrounds, and went on a mission to developmentally-appropriate content for their children and others. Youtube Channel: Show n Tell.

Online Tune Generators

• Tap a beat with Nyan Cat in this seriously fun UI/UX -> Mikutap.
• Build a dope beatbox mix with a few clicks. Endless entertainment -> Incredibox.

And… if you have some tunes/sites to share – contact us, we’ll add it in.