Music and Its Effects on an Unborn Baby

Music has effected human emotions for many years. It can be a soothing therapy for a stressful day, or a non-aggressive release for pent up emotion. Music has directly affected culture, while also having a direct connection and relationship with political views at the time. With music being such a powerful force on human emotions, can it effect the emotions of an unborn baby?

Music has had a very positive effect on my life, and with the knowledge that I was going to be a father for the first time, I got to wondering what I could do to help pass my love of music to my unborn child. It had me wondering at what stage the child would be able to hear the music that I, or his/her mother, listened to. It also had me curious if the child could not only hear the music, but also recognize it, and remember it in the future. What I have found is astounding.

Hearing is the first sense that starts to develop in the embryo. It actually begins to appear in the third week of gestation and continues to develop from there. Unborn babies actually begin to be able to hear at about sixteen weeks. Then, by the 6^th month of their gestation, they can not only hear music, but also start to have a preference to the types of music they hear.

Another astonishing fact is that unborn babies have the ability to remember the music they hear. They possess the ability to not only hear the music, as I described previously, but they also have the ability to remember what music they hear in the womb for up to a year after being born.

There are plenty of studies that insist that classical music has the best effect on the unborn child. While many professionals in the field have debated this particular point, there is a general consensus that the best choice of music for the unborn is any type that the mother enjoys. Familiarity is very important to the newborn. If the mother enjoys the music, and it relaxes her, this will directly affect the unborn babies feelings about the music, and make them associate that feeling with that particular choice of music. This familiarity will carry over to the baby after birth as well.

How then do you allow you're unborn to hear the music you want them to? While all of us have seen the images on television and movies of expectant parents placing headphones and such right on the mother's belly this is apparently not necessary. Dr. Alexander Lamont, a Lecturer in the Psychology of Music at Keele University, says: "It used to be assumed that it was really noisy in the womb but actually it's quite quiet. "So the baby should be able to hear your stereo at a reasonable volume". Dr. Lamont also states that bass frequencies will also travel through fluid better, so the deeper the bass in the song, the more chance of it being audible to the unborn child.

All of these facts are very encouraging to me, and you can bet that the wife and I will definitely be playing our favorite types of music to our unborn child. We hope to share the love and joy that we get from listening to music with our children at an early stage.

The only thing left to do is to see how our unborn child responds to various types of music, and hopefully he/she prefers Led Zeppelin and The Black Keys, with a little bit of country mixed in. I hope to have him/her smiling at the sound of "Stairway to Heaven" soon after being born into this world.

All of these things show the powerful effect music can have on human nature and personality. Love of music is all encompassing and is even beneficial to the unborn child.