A new study concludes that babies are born to dance. It followed 120 children younger than two and found they responded more to music than to words.
According to the results of a study published in the March 15 issue of Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, researchers played recordings of classical music, rhythmic beats and speech.
Professional ballet dancers were asked to rate how the little ones moved to classical music. The babies adjusted their movements to the tempo of the music. Researchers then switched to a more rhythmic sound and the babies adjusted their movements to that beat too.
The babies were seated on a parent’s lap during this study. They moved their arms, legs, hands and feet, as well as their torso and head, in response to the music they heard. They did not have this enthusiastic reaction to recordings of simple speech.
Marcel Zentner, researcher and University of York psychologist in England, told LiveScience, "Our research suggests that it is the beat rather than other features of the music, such as the melody, that produces the response in infants. We also found that the better the children were able to synchronize their movements with the music, the more they smiled."
Researchers do not know why babies have this beat within. Zentner suggests, "One possibility is that it was a target of natural selection for music. Or that it has evolved for some other function that just happens to be relevant for music processing."