Recent research shows that newborns have an innate ability to perceive musical rhythms, suggesting that this skill is not learned but rather genetically encoded.
Recent scientific research indicates that the sense of musical rhythm is an innate ability that humans are born with, rather than a learned skill. Studies conducted with dozens of newborns revealed that they are capable of anticipating rhythmic patterns from their earliest days. Researchers from the Italian Institute of Technology (IIT) in Rome state that even two-day-old infants can predict rhythmic sequences, suggesting that certain elements of musical perception may be genetically pre-programmed from birth.
The research was conducted in collaboration between the Italian Institute and a natural sciences research center along with St. Emmerich Hospital in Budapest. The study involved 49 newborns who were exposed to ten original musical pieces and four altered (rhythmically disrupted) versions of compositions by Johann Sebastian Bach while they were asleep. The brainwaves of the infants showed surprise signals when there was a change in the expected rhythmic pattern, indicating that they anticipated it to continue in a specific way, thus validating the findings that some aspects of musical understanding may be established at birth.
Published in the journal PLOS Biology, the study offers significant insights into the cognitive development of infants, emphasizing the idea that musical rhythm perception can be an intrinsic quality rather than solely reliant on postnatal learning experiences. This raises important questions about the way music education could be approached in early childhood, considering that the building blocks of musical understanding may already be present from the start of life.
