NEWBORN BABY DETECT THE BEAT IN MUSIC

This phenomenon - termed ‘beat induction’ - is likely to have contributed to music’s origin. It enables such actions as clapping, making music together and dancing to a rhythm. Beat induction is also considered to be uniquely human. Even our closest evolutionary relatives, such as the chimpanzee and bonobo, do not synchronize their behavior to rhythmic sounds.The findings, which have just been published in Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, challenge some earlier assumptions that beat induction is learned in the first few months of life, for example by parents rocking the infant.Instead, the results of this collaborative European study demonstrate that beat perception is either innate or learned in the womb, as the auditory system is at least partly functional as of approximately three month before birth. It should be noted that the auditory capabilities underlying beat induction are also necessary for bootstrapping communication by sounds, allowing infants to adapt to the rhythm of the caretaker’s speech and to find out when to respond to it or to interject their own vocalisation.Therefore, although these results are compatible with the notion of the genetic origin of music in humans, they do not provide the final answer in this longstanding debate.