James' parents also logged his primary activities that day - things like napping and meals. That technology has primarily been used in previous research studies to collect data that shows how babies develop language, not to understand how they might begin to learn about music. Benetti also listened to the recording and transcribed the music he heard and the music he made, searching for patterns or places where the child seemed to mimic what he heard happening around him. Benetti and her adviser, Eugenia Costa-Giomi, a professor of music education at Ohio State, then analyzed that audio data using software designed to measure language - things like the number of adult words the baby heard and tried to say. James wore a small, light recording device throughout the day, which captured every sound he heard and made.

'And what we learned is that in this one case at least, the baby is trying to sing along to songs he's hearing,' Benetti said.įor the study, Benetti recorded one infant, a 15-month-old boy named James, through one 16-hour period. The study is among the first to measure an infant's attempt to recreate music by following him for an entire day.

But we don't know much about how exactly this happens.' 'And infants become better at doing this spontaneously. 'We know that throughout the first year of life babies become sophisticated music listeners - they learn a lot about the patterns of pitches and rhythms in music,' said Lucia Benetti, a doctoral student at The Ohio State University School of Music and lead author of the study, which was recently published in the Journal of Research in Music Education. An analysis of the sounds showed the boy hitting the first six notes of 'Happy Birthday' almost spot-on, in G major. As part of the study, scientists captured audio of a 15-month-old boy making sounds similar to the beginning of the song 'Happy Birthday,' hours after he heard the song played on a toy.

Six the musical soundtrack