This is a journal title from an 2002 issue of the Early Child Development and Care; the author is a professor from McGill who has contributed a lot to this field.
The article tries to review the literature published and experiments done on music perception and cognition for babies.
The first thing I looked at was its 3-pages long references. I took out my highlighter and highlighted the key words to all the relevant researches. The following is the list of research done about BB's musical perception:
- Perception of duple versus triple meter (and BB usually prefers duple)
- Perception of temporal grouping in auditory patterns (that's like tempo and meter and stuff....)
- Preferences of major/minor
- Rhythm perception
- Speech perception
- Preferences for motherese speech
- Musical memory (which is a popular one)
- Sensitivity and perception to phrase structure
- The head-turn preference (this is a very interesting test)
- Categorization of musical motifs
- Pitch contours discrimination
- Perception of time and temporal regularion
- Perception of melodies
- Perception of timbre
- Music and speech processing
- Perception of good and bad melodies
- Perception of consonance and dissonance
Though, just like any research, all of these researches and studies have their limitations, psychologists are trying to prove babies' potential among the many facets of music~And these research are all published in prominent (developmental) psychology journals and bulletins~I wish I'll have time to read each of them~
ON PITCH PERCEPTION
(Based on clinical research done from 1984 - 2000)
- Infants perceive pitch while still in the womb
- Infants discriminate low pitch sounds, and hear them better than sounds with high pith.
This pattern reverses by six months:
- Not only can they discriminate low pitches better than low ones, they also show preference for high-pitched sound
ON PERCEPTION OF MELODY AND CONTOUR
(Based on clincial research results from 1984 to 1999)
(Note: melodic contour = the up and down of pitches in a melody)
- 6- to 8-month-olds can discriminate a change of a single pitch in a short melody previously heard (GING! That's like ABRSM Grade 1-3 aural test!)
- 8- to 11-month-old could discriminate some altered versions of a melody heard
- Infants encode melodic information by focusing on contour
- Infants can discrimiate semitone changes, even frequency smaller than a semitone
Implication:
- Aside from musical relevance, pitch and melody plays a big role in the aquisition of language.
ON PERCEPTION OF NON-WESTERN MUSICAL SCALES AND STYLES
(Based on clinical research done in 1990 & 1992)
- 6-months old infants show equal ability in detecting mistunings in all kinds of scales (western ones - major/minor, or non-western ones, the Javanese pelog scale in this study)
- By 12 months old, they can perform better when detecting mistunings in Western scales (major and augmented scales in the study)
Implication:
Acculturation plays an important role in music perception
ON HARMONIC PERCEPTION
(Based on clinical research done from 1991 to 1998)
- at 4 months old, infants show bias toward the consonant version over the dissonant verstion of the same songs.
- Infants can detect more changes in simpler intervals (e.g. minor 3rd, s-m) than in complex intervals (e.g. augmented 4th, d-fi)
- Infants prefer consonant (major, in the study) to dissonant (augmented) triads.
- Can discriminate changes of patterns in related keys more easily than unrelated ones.
Implication:
- infants prefer music with simple melodies and uncomplicated and repetitive accompaniments. (That's why children are usually drawn to pure singing!)
ON PERCEPTION OF RHYTHM, TEMPO AND METER
(Based on clinical research done from 1977 to 2001)
- Rhythm has something to do with perceptual grouping skill which occurs in early life.
- 6- to 9-months old can detect the alterations of rhythm within a repetitive pattern group.
- Infants group rhythmic figures by similarity
- Infants can readily discriminate contrasting rhythmic patterns.
- Infatns prefer duple meters (e.g. a marching piece) to triple meter (e.g. a waltz) (I think it's because duple meters are similar to the eveness of mothers' heartbeat and walking pace....seldom do people walk with a waltzing beat in daily life...)
- Infants can discriminate between contrasting meters and tempo (see how they get excited when they here fast music and calmed by lullabies)
Reference:
Ilari, B.S., (2002) Music Perception and Cognition in the First Year of Life, Early child Development and Care, 172(3), 311-322.
