Newborn babies feel the beat

To understand how babies and children learn to process music and other sounds, it's important to know what they can do at birth. Researchers in Hungary and the Netherlands, led by István Winkler of the Hungarian Academy of Science in Budapest, have found that three-day-old infants can distinguish the downbeat in a musical rhythm — that is, the "one" in "one, two, three, four." They used electroencephalography — the detecting of electrical activity in the brain via electrodes affixed to the head, as shown in the photo — to monitor the babies' reactions to a repeating synthesized drum rhythm from which notes were sporadically left out. When the omitted sound was a downbeat, the electrodes picked up a strong discriminative response, but when a note in any other position was left out, the infants' response was much weaker. In music played by human musicians, the downbeat is often longer or louder than the surrounding notes, but that was not the case for the computer-generated sound sequence used in the experiment: The downbeat was distinguished by the arrangement of sounds alone. The result suggests that beat perception is either innate or learned in the womb. (I. Winkler et al., Proc. Nat. Acad. Sci. USA, in press; photo courtesy of Gábor Stefanics, Hungarian Academy of Sciences.) — Johanna L. Miller