Researchers have found that music begins to shape the way we move within the first year of life.
Their research, previously published as a reviewed preprint in eLife and published today in the final version of the record, provides insight into how the developing brain gradually translates music into spontaneous movement. This study suggests that although our brains can process music early in infancy, spontaneous movements to music do not increase until around the end of the first year, and the ability to coordinate these movements to the beat develops even later. The editors of eLife call this study important and compelling results that will be of great interest to researchers studying how music processing and perception translates into behavior.
Musicality, the tendency to perceive, appreciate, and create music, is increasingly recognized as a fundamental aspect of human nature. At the heart of musicality is the engagement with music, which can be divided into two components of neurocognitive development. The sensory component – the ability to perceive and recognize music – and the motor component – the ability to move in time (in time) with the music. However, little is known about when and how musicality develops during early childhood.
This lack of knowledge is partially due to the fact that few or no studies have simultaneously investigated brain activity and spontaneous movements in response to music. Studying both the sensory and motor components of musicality in young children will provide a deeper understanding of how children learn to translate musical awareness into movement. ”
Trinh Nguyen, First Author, Affiliated Researcher, Laboratory of Perceptual and Behavioral Neuroscience, Italian Institute of Technology (IIT), Rome, Italy, Senior Researcher, University of Vienna, Austria
To address this gap, Nguyen and his colleagues listened to music to 79 infants at ages 3, 6, and 12 months and performed electroencephalogram recordings and motor measurements to understand their neural (auditory) and motor responses, respectively. Music included instrumental refrains of nursery rhymes (referred to simply as “music”), shuffled versions of the same songs (“shuffle music”), and high-pitched and low-pitched versions of songs, as pitch may play a role in auditory and motor engagement in early childhood.
From the infants’ EEG recordings, the researchers extracted event-related potentials (ERPs), an average of infants’ neural responses to pinpoint the precise timing of the brain’s response to each sound in the music, and auditory steady-state responses (ASSRs), a measure of the brain’s response to continuous sounds.
Comparing the ERPs elicited by “music” and “shuffled music,” they found that auditory responses to “music” were enhanced in all age groups, indicating that music processing begins early in development. This finding is consistent with one of their hypotheses, which is that auditory responses are enhanced when triggered by music compared to shuffled music. This is based on the idea that musical structures punctuated by shuffled music are essential for drawing infants’ attention to predictable events.
The researchers then used automated video-based movement tracking, specifically open-source software called DeepLabCut, to estimate and compare the infants’ spontaneous movements in response to the type of music. We applied a dimensionality reduction technique called principal component analysis to categorize these movements into 10 principal movements (PMs), including back and forth rocking, side to side rocking, hand clapping, leg kicking, up and down rocking, arm rowing, leg kicking, whole body wiggling, foot shuffling, and foot rowing.
Data modeling techniques highlighted a significant interaction between music type and age group, showing that only 12-month-olds showed more movements in response to ‘music’ compared to ‘shuffled music’ across all PMs. When the research team further investigated these movements, they found that this response primarily involved movements of the upper body and/or upper extremities, specifically swaying back and forth, swaying side to side, clapping hands, swaying up and down, and pedaling the arms.
In comparison, 3- and 6-month-old infants showed no significant difference in the amount of movement they made in response to “music” and “shuffled music” in either PM. When the researchers compared movements in response to high-pitched and low-pitched versions of the music, these results remained the same across all age groups.
“Throughout the first year of life, infants consistently move their lower bodies and appear to slowly develop their ability to perform more complex upper-body and whole-body movements while seated, as was seen in 12-month-olds,” Professor Nguyen explains. “We believe this increase in complexity is related to the gradual maturation of the dorsal auditory stream in the brain, a pathway previously suggested to play an important role in rhythmic entrainment and beat perception.”
Remarkably, the researchers also found that there was no evidence that infants of any age coordinated their movements to music. This indicates a gradual improvement in human motor control. The system first develops the ability to control individual muscles, followed by the ability for more coordinated whole-body movements.
“We showed that the transition to music, like the auditory encoding of music, emerges early in development. This may reflect biological or early developmental predispositions that eventually lead to dance-like behaviors, but these motor responses remain underdeveloped until 12 months of age,” concludes lead author Giacomo Novembre, principal investigator in IIT’s Perceptual and Behavioral Neuroscience Laboratory. “This study provides the first insight into how the developing brain gradually converts music into spontaneous movements. Future studies are needed to extend the characterization of musical movements beyond the first year of life and investigate what remains its enigmatic functional significance.”
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Reference magazines:
Nguyen, T. Others. (2026) Development of auditory and spontaneous motor responses to music over the first year of life. e-life. DOI: 10.7554/eLife.107088.4. https://elifesciences.org/articles/107088
