Sound sleep: Lullabies as a test case for the neurobiological effects of music

Akkermann, Miriam; Akkaya, Ugur Can; Demirel, Cąǧatay; Pflüger, Dirk; Dresler, Martin

doi:10.1017/s0140525x20001259

Cited by 4 publications

(4 citation statements)

References 37 publications

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“…An important complement to Savage P. et al (2021) and Mehr et al (2021) is that the parent–offspring bond is particularly challenged during bedtime to the point that the children need to be put to sleep by requiring costly displays of all-night parental protection strengthening their bond in order to relax and fall asleep. In fact, music has an important sleep-promoting role for infants and adults ( Feng et al, 2018 ; Akkermann et al, 2021 ), explaining the existence of lullaby songs ( Mehr et al, 2018 , 2019 ), and a nightly bedtime routine is beneficial to children’s healthy sleep and wellbeing leading to satisfactory development ( Mindell and Williamson, 2018 ).…”

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

Nocturnal selective pressures on the evolution of human musicality as a missing piece of the adaptationist puzzle

Varella

2023

Front. Psychol.

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Human musicality exhibits the necessary hallmarks for biological adaptations. Evolutionary explanations focus on recurrent adaptive problems that human musicality possibly solved in ancestral environments, such as mate selection and competition, social bonding/cohesion and social grooming, perceptual and motor skill development, conflict reduction, safe time-passing, transgenerational communication, mood regulation and synchronization, and credible signaling of coalition and territorial/predator defense. Although not mutually exclusive, these different hypotheses are still not conceptually integrated nor clearly derived from independent principles. I propose The Nocturnal Evolution of Human Musicality and Performativity Theory in which the night-time is the missing piece of the adaptationist puzzle of human musicality and performing arts. The expansion of nocturnal activities throughout human evolution, which is tied to tree-to-ground sleep transition and habitual use of fire, might help (i) explain the evolution of musicality from independent principles, (ii) explain various seemingly unrelated music features and functions, and (iii) integrate many ancestral adaptive values proposed. The expansion into the nocturnal niche posed recurrent ancestral adaptive challenges/opportunities: lack of luminosity, regrouping to cook before sleep, imminent dangerousness, low temperatures, peak tiredness, and concealment of identity. These crucial night-time features might have selected evening-oriented individuals who were prone to acoustic communication, more alert and imaginative, gregarious, risk-taking and novelty-seeking, prone to anxiety modulation, hedonistic, promiscuous, and disinhibited. Those night-time selected dispositions may have converged and enhanced protomusicality into human musicality by facilitating it to assume many survival- and reproduction-enhancing roles (social cohesion and coordination, signaling of coalitions, territorial defense, antipredatorial defense, knowledge transference, safe passage of time, children lullabies, and sexual selection) that are correspondent to the co-occurring night-time adaptive challenges/opportunities. The nocturnal dynamic may help explain musical features (sound, loudness, repetitiveness, call and response, song, elaboration/virtuosity, and duetting/chorusing). Across vertebrates, acoustic communication mostly occurs in nocturnal species. The eveningness chronotype is common among musicians and composers. Adolescents, who are the most evening-oriented humans, enjoy more music. Contemporary tribal nocturnal activities around the campfire involve eating, singing/dancing, storytelling, and rituals. I discuss the nocturnal integration of musicality’s many roles and conclude that musicality is probably a multifunctional mental adaptation that evolved along with the night-time adaptive landscape.

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Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

Nocturnal selective pressures on the evolution of human musicality as a missing piece of the adaptationist puzzle

Varella

2023

Front. Psychol.

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“…Speech sounds are emitted from a single source (i.e., vocal cords) while piano music (used in prior studies that compared music and speech in infants [42,46]) emits sounds from multiple sources (i.e., many keys strike strings simultaneously). Although the evolution of music remains a mystery [72][73][74][75][76][77][78][79], vocal music likely emerged earlier in human history than instrumental music 1 and perhaps even earlier than speech [80]. Flutes, like untrained vocalists, emit a steady tone from a single source and are used in modern, remote cultures [81].…”

Section: Current Experimentsmentioning

confidence: 99%

Preliminary evidence for selective cortical responses to music in one-month-old infants

Kosakowski

Norman-Haignere²,

Mynick³

et al. 2023

Preprint

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Prior studies have observed selective neural responses in adult human auditory cortex to music and speech that cannot be explained by the differing lower-level acoustic properties of these stimuli. Does infant cortex exhibit similarly selective responses to music and speech shortly after birth? To answer this question, we attempted to collect functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) data from 45 sleeping infants (2.0- to 11.9-weeks-old) while they listened to monophonic instrumental lullabies and infant-directed speech produced by a mother. To match acoustic variation between music and speech sounds we (1) recorded music from instruments that had a similar spectral range as female infant-directed speech, (2) used a novel excitation-matching algorithm to match the cochleagrams of music and speech stimuli, and (3) synthesized “model-matched” stimuli that were matched in spectrotemporal modulation statistics to (yet perceptually distinct from) music or speech. Of the 36 infants we collected usable data from, 19 had significant activations to sounds overall compared to scanner noise. From these infants, we observed a set of voxels in non-primary auditory cortex (NPAC) but not in Heschl's Gyrus that responded significantly more to music than to each of the other three stimulus types (but not significantly more strongly than to background scanner noise). In contrast, our planned analyses did not reveal voxels in NPAC that responded more to speech than to model-matched speech, although other unplanned analyses did. These preliminary findings suggest that music selectivity arises within the first month of life.

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“…Although the evolution of music remains a mystery (Akkermann et al, 2021;James, 1890;Lieberman & Billingsley, 2021;Mcdermott, 2008;Mehr et al, 2021;Pinker, 1997;Savage et al, 2021;Trevor & Frühholz, 2021), vocal music likely emerged earlier in human history than instrumental music 1 and perhaps even earlier than speech (Montagu, 2017). Flutes, like untrained vocalists, emit a steady tone from a single source and are used in modern, remote cultures (Jacoby et al, 2019).…”

Section: Current Experimentsmentioning

confidence: 99%

“…Speech sounds are emitted from a single source (i.e., vocal cords) while piano music (used in prior studies that compared music and speech in infants (Dehaene‐Lambertz et al., 2010; Kotilahti et al., 2010)) emits sound from multiple sources (i.e., many keys strike strings simultaneously). Although the evolution of music remains a mystery (Akkermann et al., 2021; James, 1890; Lieberman & Billingsley, 2021; Mcdermott, 2008; Mehr et al., 2021; Pinker, 1997; Savage et al., 2021; Trevor & Frühholz, 2021), vocal music likely emerged earlier in human history than instrumental music1 and perhaps even earlier than speech (Montagu, 2017). Flutes, like untrained vocalists, emit a steady tone from a single source and are used in modern, remote cultures (Jacoby et al., 2019).…”

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

Preliminary evidence for selective cortical responses to music in one‐month‐old infants

Kosakowski

Norman-Haignere

Mynick

et al. 2023

Developmental Science

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Prior studies have observed selective neural responses in the adult human auditory cortex to music and speech that cannot be explained by the differing lower‐level acoustic properties of these stimuli. Does infant cortex exhibit similarly selective responses to music and speech shortly after birth? To answer this question, we attempted to collect functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) data from 45 sleeping infants (2.0‐ to 11.9‐weeks‐old) while they listened to monophonic instrumental lullabies and infant‐directed speech produced by a mother. To match acoustic variation between music and speech sounds we (1) recorded music from instruments that had a similar spectral range as female infant‐directed speech, (2) used a novel excitation‐matching algorithm to match the cochleagrams of music and speech stimuli, and (3) synthesized “model‐matched” stimuli that were matched in spectrotemporal modulation statistics to (yet perceptually distinct from) music or speech. Of the 36 infants we collected usable data from, 19 had significant activations to sounds overall compared to scanner noise. From these infants, we observed a set of voxels in non‐primary auditory cortex (NPAC) but not in Heschl's Gyrus that responded significantly more to music than to each of the other three stimulus types (but not significantly more strongly than to the background scanner noise). In contrast, our planned analyses did not reveal voxels in NPAC that responded more to speech than to model‐matched speech, although other unplanned analyses did. These preliminary findings suggest that music selectivity arises within the first month of life. A video abstract of this article can be viewed at https://youtu.be/c8IGFvzxudk.Research Highlights Responses to music, speech, and control sounds matched for the spectrotemporal modulation‐statistics of each sound were measured from 2‐ to 11‐week‐old sleeping infants using fMRI. Auditory cortex was significantly activated by these stimuli in 19 out of 36 sleeping infants. Selective responses to music compared to the three other stimulus classes were found in non‐primary auditory cortex but not in nearby Heschl's Gyrus. Selective responses to speech were not observed in planned analyses but were observed in unplanned, exploratory analyses.

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Sound sleep: Lullabies as a test case for the neurobiological effects of music

Cited by 4 publications

References 37 publications

Nocturnal selective pressures on the evolution of human musicality as a missing piece of the adaptationist puzzle

Nocturnal selective pressures on the evolution of human musicality as a missing piece of the adaptationist puzzle

Preliminary evidence for selective cortical responses to music in one-month-old infants

Preliminary evidence for selective cortical responses to music in one‐month‐old infants

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