There are many rewards from a musically rich early life. Chief among these, of course, is that it helps set a child on a lifelong path where music is enjoyed for its own sake — a stalwart companion through life’s ups and downs, a friend with whom to celebrate or seek solace.

Beyond that, there is strong evidence that growing up in a musically rich environment — especially with early experiences of listening, moving and singing — carries advantages as children progress to more formal learning.

But we’re getting ahead of ourselves.

Beethoven said that “music is the electrical soil in which the spirit lives, thinks and invents.” Unwittingly, he was foreshadowing the great strides in knowledge about music and the brain which have come from contemporary neuroscience and other disciplines. For example, research tells us that a child’s relationship with music begins before birth and is hard-wired in the womb, with the particular musicality of the mother’s voice creating a powerful bond which scientists think is a survival strategy carried through evolution. Incidentally, if you are using this collection to provide musical nurturing to your baby in utero, you don’t need to bother with headphones on your belly, as amniotic fluid is a tremendously effective conductor of soundwaves.

We also know that music can help young children acquire language and numeracy skills: just think of the way in which most of us learned the alphabet in song, or our times tables to a rhythmic pattern. As the teen years hit, research shows that young people’s relationship with music is as important to them as their relationship with friends, and their listening choices give them a powerful way to assert their sense of identity at this time. So, as we develop through childhood, navigate adolescence and continue through our lives, music is right there with us, marking milestones and setting moods for all occasions.

This collection has been organised into two moods: one to energise and stimulate, the other (beginning with track 25 in the playlist above: Warlock’s Capriol Suite) to soothe and relax.

While having music playing in the background is extremely valuable — to you and to your child — you might also use this collection in a more active way. Whichever mood you choose, consider using it as an opportunity to connect with your child, because we know that things like smiles, laughter, touch, and playful, happy interaction can be as important to an infant’s development as food or sleep. These are all things which music can help facilitate.

Use the energising collection to dance together, march, clap each other’s hands, beat time on your knees, listen for musical phrases you can sing, say out loud the names of instruments you can hear. For older children, use the music to start a conversation about how the music makes each of you feel. In this way, you help focus your child’s attention while also sending a clear message that music is something to which we respond.

Don’t worry if you think you can’t dance or sing in tune. The main thing is to show joy and model your love of the music and your engagement with it. There may well come a time when your older child is embarrassed by you, but young children rarely show anything but adoration, so go for it while you can! And while this disc has been designed to stimulate, it provides a perfect musical backdrop against which your young child might be encouraged to burn off some energy before the second mood bracket signals “calm time.”

You may find that the soothing collection calms your infant and helps reduce your own stress levels — there is plenty of evidence about the role of music in reducing the stress hormone, cortisol. Use it at bath time or during feeding, as a musical cue for nap-time and, again, take the opportunity for gentle swaying with your child in your arms if you can, soft humming, or as a backdrop to massage.

The New York Times recently looked at some music therapy research conducted with premature babies. When a baby’s stress response is decreased, it can devote more of its oxygen and calories to developing and growing. In a medical context, this of course has potent flow-on effects, in that the baby can leave hospital sooner, which aids its development and family bonding, and places less of a burden on health services. There are even hospitals, says the report, which find music safer for infants than sedation, and just as effective, before procedures such as heart sonograms and brain monitoring.

One reason for its effectiveness in stress reduction may be that music is “organised, purposeful sound amid the unpredictable, over-stimulating noise” of hospital wards. “Sound can be damaging,” says Helen Shoemark, a music researcher at Melbourne’s Murdoch Children’s Research Institute. “But meaningful noise is important for a baby’s brain development.”

Of course there is a place for more passive listening, too, and the great thing about this collection is its diversity. Early childhood researchers agree that children benefit from a musical menu with scope and depth. “Play adult quality music,” US early childhood music expert Eric Rasmussen told PBS Parents, adding that parents and carers should “play multiple genres of music, [and music] that changes its sound frequently, where there is contrast.” Music that shifts in tone colour frequently — such as orchestral music — will maintain a child’s interest, he says. Above all, say researchers, play music which you enjoy.

One of the most quoted — but misrepresented — bits of science about the role of music on the brain is the “Mozart Effect.” Conducted two decades ago, the research compared the effects of silence, relaxation music and a Mozart sonata on one aspect of listeners’ IQ tests. While there were positive changes with the Mozart, they were very short lived — on average, just ten minutes. Thanks to media hype, the misnamed “effect” has been with us ever since, and debate has continued to rage. That said, recent reports cite a new Harvard University study which has again found a positive effect on participants’ reaction times to various logic-based tests, regardless of their age, if they had Mozart playing in the background, proving that the science community’s fascination with Wolfgang Amadeus certainly remains alive to this day!

While there appears to be nothing definitive about music listening making young children “smarter” over the long term, there is no debate that infants understand, process and react to music, noticing pitch, patterns, melodies and rhythm.

Philosopher Friedrich Nietzsche said: “We listen to music with our muscles.” Picking up on that, renowned researcher and physician Oliver Sacks wrote in the neuroscience journal Brain about the link between our motor system and the way we process music. Just think of the way we tap our feet to music, he says, and the way we keep time, hum, sing along, “conduct,” assume facial expressions which mirror the rise and fall, the “melodic contours and feelings” of what we are hearing — often without our knowledge or, seemingly, volition.

Because our nervous systems are tuned for it, humans have a particular sensitivity to music. We know that sounds are more potent stimuli than sights in most people, as auditory receptors cover a larger region of the brain. So, it is clear that music isn’t just the food of love. It’s brain food, too.

While there are benefits which come from music listening, more still come from music making, a fact which led Sacks to assert that musical performance is as important to a child’s education as reading and writing. Take a 2006 Canadian study, for example, which compared the effect of just one year’s violin training on children’s brain development, and found striking changes compared to the children’s non-playing peers. More recently in Australia, Melbourne education researchers Brian Caldwell and Tanya Vaughan have written about the transformative impacts of music learning on disadvantaged children’s academic achievement, social and emotional wellbeing and even school attendance.

What’s the best way to get young children ready for music learning? Prime them with musically rich listening experiences which you enjoy, including taking them to a wide variety of live music performances whenever you can.

But let’s not get too hung up on benefits to learning or social skills or school attendance, as though we need to convince ourselves that the role of music in young children’s lives needs to be justified. We owe music more than that, for its own sake.

As Russian composer Igor Stravinsky so aptly put it: “The trouble with music appreciation in general is that people are taught to have too much respect for music. They should be taught to love it instead.”

We don’t need to do anything other than share our own love of listening to wonderful music to set our children on a lifelong love affair of their own, one that will enrich and nourish them forever.

Enjoy.

Tina Broad, Tina Broad is a writer, researcher and music advocate.

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