Musical elements in human infants’ cries: In the beginning is the melody

Abstract

Crying is the earliest sound production of human infants on their long way toward language. Here, we argue that infants’ early crying contains melodic constituents for both musical and prosodic structures. This view is based on our findings that cry melodies become increasingly complex during the first months of life and, that complex cry melodies are composed of shape-specific melody arcs. We found that cry melodies contain frequency ratios that show a certain preference of musical intervals. We also observed that young infants are capable of uttering shape-similar melody arcs at different frequency levels, that means they have an aptitude for frequency transposition from birth on. Moreover, we observed that the production of phonatory breaks within single expiratory sounds generates rhythmical elements and points to a flexible time organization. Our data support the view that in crying elementary constituents of both musicality and language faculty are unfolding. The results may elucidate the relation between emotionally charged sounds and music respectively language and suggest direction for further research.

Associations between respiratory arrhythmia and fundamental frequency of spontaneous crying in preterm and term infants at term‐equivalent age

“…Preterm birth is also a factor in the higher F 0 of cries during early infancy. Several previous studies have reported that, compared to term newborns, the F 0 of cries of preterm infants are higher before term-equivalent age (Johnston et al, 1993;Michelsson, J€ arvenp€ a€ a, & Rinne, 1983) or even at term-equivalent age (Shinya, Kawai, Niwa, & Myowa-Yamakoshi, 2014). However, it remains unclear why preterm infants' cries possess a higher F 0 during early infancy, although some possible factors have been discussed.…”

Testing software tools for newborn cry analysis using synthetic signals

“…Thus, the F 0 values of the synthesized signals are allowed to vary in this range. F 0 variations were set according to the basic melody shapes of the newborn cry [23,[34][35][36][37]:…”

“…• The complex shape is defined as composed by multiple arcs (at least 2) [34]. We synthesized a double-arc shape whose maxima (with frequency equal to 590 Hz) are located at 0.25 s and 1.25 s respectively.…”

Beneficios del entrenamiento musical para el aprendizaje de una lengua extranjera

“…Parten de la premisa que la adquisición de una lengua depende de la interacción y afirman que tanto el discurso de los padres como el de los maestros se asemejan en cuanto a las frecuentes repeticiones, el uso de expresiones lexicalizadas, las expansiones, la preferencia por un vocabulario simplificado, pero también por el cambio en el volumen de la voz así como las modificaciones de los contornos melódicos. Estas exageradas melodías en el habla han sido descritas como comportamientos intuitivos de los padres que guían a sus hijos en el aprendizaje musical (Papousek, 1996) pero que, a su vez, se establecen como elementos de comunicación que facilitan el aprendizaje de la L1 (Feu & Piñero, 1996) y más en concreto, las melodías del llanto de los niños han sido definidas como soportes de la comunicación pre-verbal (Wermke & Mende 2009). …”

“…En una etapa muy temprana del proceso de adquisición de la L1, los llantos, arrullos y balbuceos de los bebés se producen con una gran variedad de formas melódicas (Wermke & Mende, 2006;2009;Wermke, 2002). Wermke y Mende (2009), basándose en sus estudios longitudinales de los últimos 25 años, postulan que la melodía en el llanto de los bebés es un precursor del habla.…”