If you’ve ever come to a Kindermusik class, you’ll notice that we will have a steady beat activity every week, in every age group. It might involve shakers, streamers, or drums. Or singing, chanting or lap bouncing. Or maybe moving our bodies or dancing. Or even stomping, gliding or tiptoeing.

A baby hears a constant steady beat (mom’s heartbeat!) by 22 weeks after conception. And every infant is born with the ability to keep a steady beat – his own internal beat.  Sometimes in a Village class, a piece of music will match a baby’s own beat, and you’ll see him or her banging away in perfect rhythm!

Steady beat for babies:
Exposure to steady beat (hearing it, feeling it, “seeing it”, being moved to it) is important for a baby’s developing sense of steady beat. An internalized awareness of beat will help him to coordinate his movements.

A baby who is beginning to internalize a steady beat will show it through rocking, nodding, patting and kicking. Later she’ll be able to demonstrate steady beat through clapping and playing a drum to a steady beat.  Steady beat will be a key factor in his learning to walk.

Steady beat for toddlers:
Children 18 months through 3 years old are learning to control and coordinate their body’s movements. The ability to keep a steady beat helps in walking with a smooth gait, leading to running and jumping with confidence.

It is at this age that feeling and moving to a steady beat develops the ability to organize and coordinate movements with proper timing – like bouncing a ball and catching it.

Steady beat for preschoolers:
Steady beat competency is central to the development of movement organization, such a marching in time, dribbling and shooting a basketball, using scissors and writing smoothly. Being able to move their entire body to a steady beat leads to the ability to speak and read with a smooth cadence, thereby enhancing communication abilities.

Interesting steady beat facts:
A sample study was done of first and second string NFL players.  100% of the first string players could maintain a steady beat without any external stimulus for 45 seconds.  Only 50% of the second string players could accomplish the same.

Tests show that children with steady beat internalization are better readers and more successful in math. Children with better abilities in steady beat are reported to be better behaved in class and have less aggressive physical contact with other students.

It is well-known that a stutter does not stutter when singing or using a steady beat while speaking. A stuttering student figured out her own solution: when she wanted to answer a question, she tapped a steady beat on her leg before speaking. This allowed her to answer without stuttering.

As the result of a study done in 2002 by University College in London, scientists believe that a poor sense of rhythm could be the cause of dyslexia. “Researchers concluded that an awareness of beats can influence the way young children assimilate speech patterns, which may in turn affect their reading and writing abilities.”

Steady beat helps children to understand and organize their world. So if you are going to run with scissors, make sure you’ve got a good sense of steady beat. You’ll run more coordinated and smoothly, and thereby be a little bit safer.

-posted by Miss Analiisa, whose mother reported that at 2 weeks old, Analiisa consistently rocked in time to a piece of classical music that had been often played while she was in utero. But sadly, she was a horrible basketball player.

I believe that music, as the only activity that simultaneously stimulates every area of the brain, is the best choice for my children through first grade.  But what after they were done with Kindermusik?

All my children are homeschooled, so I get to help make those choices. In my house, we continue music . Rob plays violin, Nathan plays flute. (And no, I don’t force them to do music!) But what about the other arts? Visual arts (painting, drawing, photography, graphics, set making, etc.), and kinesthetic arts (movement, dance, and theater).

My instincts told me that as my children were interested (Rob loves musical theater and gymnastics – Nathan loves Sculpey clay and drawing), I should let them integrate the other arts into their day.

Thanks to Facebook, I reconnected with 2 college girlfriends over Christmas. Pam the percussionist is now an elementary music teacher, Lucy the trumpet player now a Principal at middle and high school.  We traded memories, laughs and books.

Pam gave me a book she’d read by Eric Jensen called Arts with the Brain in Mind. It confirmed what my heart already knew – arts enhance the process of learning. The brain systems they nourish, which include our integrated sensory, attentional, cognitive, emotional and motor capabilities, are, in fact, the driving forces behind all other learning.

That doesn’t mean your child can’t learn without studying music, or visual or kinesthetic arts. The arts, however, provide learners with opportunities to simultaneously develop and mature multiple brain systems.  

The arts develop neural systems that often take months and years to fine-tune. The long-term benefits of the arts include everything from fine motor skills to creativity and improved emotional balance. 

Maybe the most valuable benefit of including the arts in your child’s education is that the arts make better human beings.  The arts promote self-discipline and motivation, social harmony, enhanced creativity, emotional expression and a greater cultural awareness.

What long-term studies are beginning to show is that students who participate in the arts may be less likely to be dropouts, have higher attendance, be better team players, and have an increased love of learning.

And who doesn’t want to have children grow up to be happy, well-balanced, creative, problem solvers, and work and play well with others?

­-posted by Miss Analiisa, who as her children’s teacher, is seeing for herself the long-term benefits of clay, paint, band and drama.

Ever lost something and then thought “Hmm… I wonder where I put that?”  Well, now you and your child can have fun looking for the misplaced items.  Just change the words of this Our Time Away We Go song and instead of finding frustration, you and your child will find laughter and a good time looking for things.  

For example, the other day I just couldn’t find my purse, so I started sing “Where oh where did I put my purse? Where oh where did I put my purse?”  All of sudden, I remembered that I’d left it in the car, and I happily went out there singing “Found it, found it, here is my purse!”  Luckily, not too many neighbors were home at the time and they all know what I do for a living, so when I break out into song it doesn’t really faze them!

I love hearing that my Our Time classes have already started to enjoy this game at home too!  Even on the first day of class, one mommy came running back into class saying that her child was jingling her keys as they were leaving! 

Singing with your child not only helps build self-confidence, but it is a wonderful way to bond as well.  Just as in story reading, singing directly exposes the singers to patterns of language, including rhythm, speech sounds, syntax and rhyme.

For your older child, try singing a song and allowing your child to fill in the blanks. (“Twinkle, twinkle, little ________”.)  By doing this, you are developing her sense of inner hearing as related to pitch and melody. 

Singing a song in your mind is akin to thinking up a story or making a plan without speaking out loud.  Remembering the sequence adds an additional level of complexity.  All these are vital life skills.

-posted by Miss Beth, who happily sings at any chance she gets…..including the grocery store when looking for the bread!

Anne Fernald is a psychology professor at Stanford who directs the Center For Infant Studies.  Dr. Fernald specializes in children’s language development. She believes there is a kind of universal music inside language, and first made this observation at a hospital in Munich, where the obstetric ward was full of Turkish, Sicilian, Greek, Russian, Dutch and Jewish women.

Dr. Fernald couldn’t understand anything these mothers spoke. However, the moment they put their babies down, and no longer were touching them, the mothers starting to almost “sing” to their babies. They used “spoken melodies” to remain in touch with their babies.  (Think about how you speak to your infant – “There you are, Livvy.  Hello beautiful girl!”) Try it right now. Imagine you are speaking to baby who is lying on her blanket on the floor.

So Dr. Fernald packed up her tape recorder and went off all over the world, recording how parents talked to their very young babies.  It did not matter if the language spoken was a romance language or a tone language; she heard the same melodies. When a parent wanted to show the child they were happy, the melody was always a rise-fall, no matter the language. “Good boy! You got it!” She saw that the melody kept the child doing a behavior or action.

There are three other universal melodies as well. If a parent wanted their child to stop, the melody was short and sharp and staccato. “Wait. Stop. No.” To draw a child’s attention to something, the melody was a higher, rising pitch – “Look at the horsie.” The fourth melody is one of comfort. “Oh, sweetie. I’ll be right there.”

This is music that is understood by infants who are just new in the world. We all know these songs and what they mean, no matter what language is being spoken. To Dr. Fernald, this isn’t about the language, or even the words; it’s about the sounds. The sounds which are more like touch. Do these sounds startle or caress us gently? She defines sound as “touch as a distance”.

Looking back, I see that I did this same thing with my own babies, as well as other little ones I currently come into contact with. Parents everywhere speak “music as touch”, (it’s technically called “motherese”), and no one taught us. And it doesn’t matter if we are in a public place; we do it without regard for who might overhear. What an interesting, universal, musical language.

If you are interested in hearing the whole podcast, you may listen here.

-posted by Miss Analiisa, who just realized she is instinctively using this same “motherese” on her son’s Christmas present – a 4 ½ month old beagle puppy. She’s not sure if it’s working yet.

Diana Deutsch is a professor at UCSD specializing in the psychology of music. She studies how humans perceive sound.  In her research, she “loops” recorded sounds in order to listen to them over and over.  She loops the spoken phrase “sometimes behave so strangely”, listens to it for a while, and then leaves it on and goes to the next room to make some tea.

Suddenly, she hears someone singing. But as she listens, realizes it is not singing at all, but rather, the loop has begun to sound like singing. And in fact, each of the words has pitch, and she can play it on the piano. The spoken words had become music. What made it turn into music? In other words, what is music made of? 

Neuroscientists who study how humans perceive sound tell us that when we speak, we sing. We use pitch in our speech to convey emotion and meaning. We raise the pitch at the end of a sentence to show we are asking a question.

In tone languages (like Mandarin Chinese), words take on different meanings, depending on the pitch of the syllable. The word “ma”, depending on the pitch used, can mean “mother, hemp, horse or a reproach”.

Diana Deutsch was working with some Mandarin speakers. She noticed was that there were words, that when they were spoken, the speakers would all hit precisely the same pitch, even on different days.  Dr. Deutsch concluded that this was a form of what musicians call “perfect pitch”.  Someone with perfect pitch can hear a note (anything with a pitch – a horn honk or an elevator ding or a faucet drip), and know exactly what pitch it is, and even how much out of tune it is.

Perfect pitch is very rare. Only one person in every 10,000 in Europe or North America has perfect pitch. Every famous composer, i.e. Mozart, Bach, Beethoven, Mendelssohn, had perfect pitch.

Diana Deutsch then decided to compare Chinese music students from Bejing to American students who were studying at the Eastman School of Music, to find out which group had more people with perfect pitch. Of the students who began musical training at the age of 4 or 5, 74% of the Chinese had perfect pitch, but only 14% of the Americans had perfect pitch. As a whole group, the Chinese were 9 times as likely to have perfect pitch as the Americans.

The difference? The Chinese students all spoke a tone language. Here is Dr. Deutsch’s explanation: It is well-known that in the first year of life, from 6 months to a little past a year, infants learn features of their native language. Infants who learn a tone language are really learning two languages – one of those being music, as syllables in tone language have pitches. Think about it – we often stereotype tone languages as being “sing-songy”.  It can be theorized that these infants might also get a leg-up on other musical skills as they learn their tone language.  

So, what does all that really mean for parents who don’t speak a tone language at home? Do we start our children in language school by 6 months? Rosetta Stone for infants? Move to China? Are our children to be forever at a disadvantage? Of course not! (Though advertisers may tell you otherwise.)

What is the one thing universally available that will assist in developing language in your children? Research tells us that it is music. So, play lots of variety of music for your children. Bring your child to Kindermusik. I recommend beginning at least by 4 months, and even earlier should your baby have a somewhat predictable schedule.

-posted by Miss Analiisa, who thinks that perhaps her oldest Nathan had a little too much music as an infant, as she sometimes can’t get him to stop talking!

You may hear the podcast in its entirety here.  

This story on NPR caught my attention last month. Exciting research was presented at Neuroscience 2009 in Chicago in October that suggests that musicians’ auditory pathways are distinctly different from non-musicians.

Nina Kraus, scientist at Northwestern University, conducted a study comparing trained musicians to the general population in how they perceive and interpret sound. Each subject heard a person reciting simple sentence, but each time they heard it, there was increasing levels of background noise. Kraus’s team of researchers discovered that the musicians were able to pick out the voice more easily and accurately than the non-musician group.

Standard hearing tests, however, show that musicians and non-musicians ears have the same sensitivity. So what’s the difference?

It’s in the neural hearing system, Kraus says. Like a muscle, the brain gets stronger with use. “Musical experience can change how our brain interacts with sounds,” she says. “It’s almost like the brain is better able to pay attention to sound and [to] better extract meaning from sound.”  Musicians, and students of music, must pay close attention to qualities such as pitch, timing and tone. They also need to be able to listen for particular sounds amidst the cacophony of the orchestra, band or choir.

These aspects of sound are the ones that are particularly difficult for children struggling with language development. When given a simple test asking them to distinguish one sound from another, musicians excel, while people with dyslexia and other language problems do poorly. A study conducted by Dana Strait suggests that musical training could help these children who are struggling with language. “These kids seem to be impaired in the very areas that musicians excel,” says Ms. Strait. “Musical experience can change how our brain interacts with sounds”.

We as parents and teachers need to help these children in their muscle-building as much as we can. While cultivating musical home environment and bringing your child to Kindermusik classes won’t necessarily lead to raising a concert pianist, it seems that it is the best thing we can do for their ears and their language skills.

-posted by Miss Katie, who now understands why she gets so distracted in a room full of people!