Early Musical Capabilities and the Development of Musical Skills

Kant and Descarte argued for innate (from birth) musical abilities 

John Lock said that infants are born with a 'clean slate' - tabula rasa

Learning can occur prenatally

• infant hears the mother's heartbeat, breath and speech patterns from inside the womb
• amniotic fluid acts as a low pass filter but infant can hear some external sounds such as pitch and dynamics in speech

A study showed that newborns will turn their eyes and heads in response to an interesting sight or sound. This can tell us whether an infant can discriminate between two different stimuli and shows us which stimuli they prefer

Habituation - infants pay attention to novel sounds, sights, and smells rather than familiar ones

Physiological measures 

Cortisol - released by adrenal glands in response to stress, swabbed from infant's mouth 

Heart rate changes - reflective of brain activity, sensors placed on infant's chest, measures taken before, during and/or after experiement to monitor physiological response

Infants are sensitive to

• consonance and dissonance - newborns prefer consonant to dissonant intervals (Masataka, 2006)
• timbre (Michel, 1973)
• Perfect fifth intervals - (Trainor, 1993)

In the first year of life, infants show grouping principles (proximity, similarity, continuity, symmetry) of rhythm perception (Thorpe et al, 1988)

Infants are senstive to musical contour (Ferland et al, 1989)

Infants short-term memory for music is influenced by tonality, temporal regularity, degree of consonance

Infants recognise transposed melodies (Chang, 1977)

Between the ages of 3-8 children rapidly increase sensitivity to timbre (Lowther, 2004)

There are few differences between trained and untrained children in their ability to detect temporal irregularities (Drake et al, 2000)

Understanding of key harmony emerges between 5-7 years (Trainor, 1994)

Music plays a role in…