Music cognition in early infancy: infants’ preferences and long-term memory for Ravel

Abstract

Listening preferences for two pieces, Prelude and Forlane from Le tombeau de Couperin by Maurice Ravel (1875-1937), were assessed in two experiments conducted with 8-month-old infants, using the Headturn Preference Procedure (HPP). Experiment 1 showed that infants, who have never heard the pieces, could clearly make a distinction between the Prelude and Forlane when the latter are played in multiple (i.e. orchestral) but not single (i.e. piano) timbres. In Experiment 2 infants were exposed repeatedly to one of the two piano pieces over a 10-day period. Concurrent with previous studies, results suggested that babies can recognize a familiar piece after a 2-week delay. Implications for early childhood music education are outlined at the end of the article.

Music in infant-directed digital video discs: a content analysis

“…This is consistent with Ilari and Polka's (2006) suggestion that readily available resources for young children tend to favour short and simple baroque and classical pieces that are repetitive, homophonic and have simple structure, harmonies and progressions. Classical Baby, Music Sounds and two sets of Baby Genius DVDs (including the DVDs The Four Seasons, Underwater Adventures, Mozart and Friends and Mozart and Friends Sleepytime) include several such pieces of music, with authentic orchestration and instrumentation.…”

Experiences of pregnant women attending a lullaby programme in Limerick, Ireland: A qualitative study

“…Similar findings of infant expectancy are found in the current study. The notion of fostering musical appreciation in the infant is more difficult to locate in the literature and studies are more concerned with infant music perception skills (Ilari and Polka, 2006;Trehub, 2003) rather than establishing if prenatal exposure to music changes this relationship. Trehub (2003) for example, found that the music perception skills of infants as young as 6 months were well advanced and showed little difference to those of individuals who had many years of exposure to music.…”

Melody recognition by two-month-old infants

“…They can remember musical pieces for weeks (Ilari and Polka, 2006;Trainor et al, 2004;Saffran et al, 2000), discriminate single note changes to a short melody (e.g., Trehub et al, 1985;Trainor and Trehub, 1992), and recognize melodies in transposition (e.g., Chang and Trehub, 1977;Trainor and Trehub, 1992;Plantinga and Trainor, 2005). The presence of these skills early in development suggests that humans begin life with a predisposition to process music.…”