New research published in journal e-life This provides evidence that babies begin processing the structure of music very early in life, but that developing the ability to physically adjust their bodies to the beat of the music takes much longer. The findings suggest that while infants’ brains can distinguish between organized songs and unorganized sounds, complex rhythmic movements emerge gradually. These insights help explain how human musicality transitions from passive listening to active physical activity during the first year of life.
Musicality generally includes two main elements. The first is the sensory component, which involves the ability to perceive and recognize musical patterns. The second component is the motor component, which involves the ability to coordinate body movements to the rhythm of the music, such as foot tapping or dancing.
Scientists understand quite a bit about how sensory elements develop. Research shows that the human auditory system is sensitive to simple musical regularities from an early age. However, physical responses to music are poorly understood during early childhood development.
Prior to this recent experiment, no studies had simultaneously tracked brain activity and spontaneous body movements in infants under one year of age. To fill this knowledge gap and observe precisely the moment when perception transforms into physical action, a team of scientists initiated the current investigation. This project was supported by a European Research Council Starting Grant known as MUSICOM. The grant was awarded to Giacomo Novembre, principal investigator in the Laboratory of Perceptual and Behavioral Neuroscience at the Italian Institute of Technology in Rome.
The University of Vienna acted as a partner in this project by providing access to early childhood participants. Quynh Trinh Nguyen, a researcher currently affiliated with Heidelberg University, the Italian Institute of Technology, and the University of Vienna, explained the motivation behind the study.
“Almost everyone in every culture listens to music and moves to it. It’s instinctive,” Nguyen said. “So musicality provides an interesting window into human nature, but it also raises a fundamental developmental mystery. We actually know very little about when and how these abilities first emerge.”
Nguyen noted that abilities that emerge in the first few months of life tend to be the most important for human development. “Music and movement are tied to how young children communicate and bond with their caregivers long before they can speak,” she said. “There’s a lot of research into how young children perceive music, but much less about how that perception translates into movement and ultimately leads to things like dance.”
The team designed an experiment to fill this knowledge gap. “Few people had measured brain activity and spontaneous body movements in babies this young at the same time,” Nguyen told SciPost. “We also wanted to do something that previous studies weren’t able to do: include appropriate controls.”
By comparing real songs to scrambled versions of the same songs, scientists were able to test for specific responses. “We might be able to ask whether young children respond specifically to the structure of music rather than sounds in general,” Nguyen says.
Another reason for the study was to investigate the specific effects of musical pitch. High pitched sounds are a hallmark of adults speaking and singing naturally to young children. The authors wanted to test whether high-pitched music naturally increases brain responses and increases body movement compared to low-pitched music.
To examine these developmental stages, the scientists recruited 79 infants born at full term with no known developmental delays. Infants were divided into three different age groups. The sample included 26 children aged 3 months, 26 children aged 6 months, and 27 children aged 12 months. A control group of 26 young adults also participated to provide a baseline of adult brain responses.
The experimental procedure involved sitting the infant in a baby seat facing a computer screen. To keep the toddlers calm and occupied, the screen played a silent video of blooming flowers slowly fading in and out. As the infant looked at the screen, various music clips were played through audio speakers placed on either side of the monitor.
The audio stimuli consisted of short instrumental choruses of two popular nursery rhymes. The researchers created four different versions of these songs to test different sensory responses. The first version was standard music, featuring a regular melody and rhythmic bass line.
The second version was shuffled music and served as a control condition. In this version, the researchers randomized the order of the notes and randomized the timing. This process destroyed the regular beat and melodic structure of the original song.
The third and fourth versions kept the standard musical structure but changed the pitch. The treble condition moved the melody up an octave. The bass condition moved the baseline down an octave. All audio clips were 21 seconds long and played at exactly the same speed and volume.
As participants listened to audio clips, researchers used electroencephalography to record brain activity. This non-invasive method involves placing a cap on your head that has tiny sensors that measure electrical signals generated by your brain. The scientists specifically looked at temporary spikes in brain activity that occur in direct response to specific sensory events, such as the beginning of a musical note.
At the same time, three video cameras filmed the infant from the front, oblique, and side views. To analyze the video data, the researchers used a special computer program that automatically tracks body movements without the need for physical motion capture markers.
“Methodologically, what I’m proud of is that instead of treating movement as a single chunk of ‘activity,’ we used marker-free video tracking to break down whole-body movements into discrete components such as sways, sways, clap-like movements, and kicks,” Nguyen said. “To our knowledge, this has never been done using infant data before, and we were able to find out not only how much the baby moved, but also what movements the music actually caused.”
Mr. Nguyen also expressed his gratitude to the participants. “I would also like to thank the families who participated,” she said. “Collecting infant EEG and video is extremely demanding, and none of this would exist without their patience.”
When the researchers analyzed the brain data, they found that infants in all three age groups showed higher neural responses to standard music compared to shuffled music. The brain waves of the 3-month-old, 6-month-old, and 12-month-old children all showed stronger electrical spikes when listening to organized musical structures.
“The brain is ready for music surprisingly early, and babies as young as 3 months old respond more strongly to real music than to scrambled music, so the encoding of musical structure is already in place in the first few months of life,” Nguyen explained.
In contrast, disorganized sounds did not evoke the same level of neural processing. “Acoustically, these sounds should stimulate the brain, but the scrambled music elicited very few distinct brain responses,” Nguyen said. “We think this reflects something at a higher level. If there is no learnable structure in the sound stream, the brain seems to disconnect from it rather than continue to track it closely.”
Movement data painted a different picture of physical maturation. “Based on the perceptual literature showing how quickly and how finely infants perceive the structure of music, we expected to see at least some differences in how much infants move to music and how much they move to scrambled music at all ages, even if those movements were not in sync with the beat,” Nguyen said.
“We weren’t like that. It wasn’t until the 12th month that there was a noticeable difference,” she continued. “That really surprised us.” For the oldest infants, listening to structured music triggered specific movements of the upper body, such as pedaling with the arms, swinging from front to back, and swinging from side to side.
“It wasn’t until 12 months that the baby started moving reliably to the music, making rocking, swaying, and clapping movements rather than scrambled music,” Nguyen said. “And we had never seen movement that was actually synchronized to the beat in any era.”
This reveals a gap between awareness and physical coordination. “So the headline is that listening to music and transitioning to it happen on different timelines. The brain is already processing the music long before the body learns to respond and organize itself,” Nguyen said. “The ability to truly coordinate music and movement, the seeds of dance, is still developing well past their first birthday.”
Regarding the effect of pitch, the results showed interesting variations between different age groups. Only 6-month-old infants showed stronger brain responses to high-pitched music compared to low-pitched music.
Interestingly, movement analysis showed that high-pitched music was generally better at predicting infants’ spontaneous movements than low-pitched music in all three age groups. “The results for pitch were also puzzling in an interesting way. Stronger brain responses to high-pitched versus low-pitched music emerged only at 6 months of age, but high-pitched music predicted movement at all ages tested. There is no clear explanation for that discrepancy,” Nguyen said.
Although the study provides new insights into young children’s development, the authors stress that it maps natural growth rather than providing practical advice to parents. “This is basic science about when these abilities emerge developmentally, not a recipe for enhancing them,” Nguyen explained.
“While the effects are real and consistent, they describe when certain responses first appear, not measurable skills that can be trained or benchmarks that individual babies should achieve,” she added. “While it is clear that music is a rich and engaging stimulus for infants, and that is a natural observation for caregivers and educators, we are wary of claims that certain types of music make infants smarter or more cooperative, as we characterize their natural developmental trajectory.”
The researchers also highlighted some potential misconceptions about dance in young children. “We found no evidence that infants of any age, including 12-month-olds, moved to the beat,” Nguyen said. “Their movements were related to changes in the intensity of the music, but they were not synchronized to the music. Movements that are harmonious and to the beat seem to develop later in infancy and childhood.”
Several methodological factors are also important when interpreting the results. “This study is cross-sectional, testing babies at different ages rather than following the same babies over time, so it captures group trajectories rather than individual development,” Nguyen noted.
The physical setup of the experiment also influenced the types of movements captured by the cameras. “The infants were tested in a sitting position, which made upper body movements such as rocking, rocking, and clapping easier, and leg rests harder to read, so we didn’t fully understand how babies moved freely,” she says.
Additionally, the authors used only two nursery rhymes, suggesting the need to test more diverse vocal stimuli. The shuffling process used to create disorganized music changed both pitch and timing at the exact same time. “Because our scramble disrupted both timing and pitch at once, we cannot yet distinguish whether the brain’s stronger response to music reflects sensitivity to rhythm, sensitivity to melody, or sensitivity to both,” Nguyen explained.
Future studies may address these factors and extend the current findings. “There are some long-term goals that are worth pursuing,” Nguyen said. “We want to follow this trajectory through the first year until the movement actually starts to harmonize with the music, capturing the transition from movement near the beat to movement on the beat.”
The scientists also plan to investigate how the environment affects these physical reactions. “We are also interested in observing this effect in more natural situations, such as when infants are at home or listening to music with others,” Nguyen added. “We also hope to disentangle rhythm from pitch with stimuli designed for that purpose and link these behavioral changes to the maturation of the dorsal auditory stream, the brain pathway that connects hearing and movement.”
The study, “Development of auditory and locomotor responses to music over the first year of life,” was authored by Trinh Nguyen, Félix Bigand, Susanne Reisner, Atesh Koul, Roberta Bianco, Gabriela Markova, Stefanie Hoehl, and Giacomo Novembre.
