Quynh Trinh Nguyen<\/a>, a researcher currently affiliated with Heidelberg University, the Italian Institute of Technology, and the University of Vienna, explained the motivation behind the research.<\/p>\n\u201cAlmost everyone, in every culture, listens to music and moves to it, and it feels instinctive,\u201d Nguyen said. \u201cThat makes musicality a fascinating window into human nature, but it raises a basic developmental puzzle: we actually know very little about when and how these abilities first appear.\u201d<\/p>\n
Nguyen noted that abilities emerging in the first months of life tend to be the ones that matter most for human development. \u201cMusic and movement are tied to how infants communicate and bond with their caregivers long before they can speak,\u201d she said. \u201cThere\u2019s a good amount of research on how infants perceive music, but far less on how perception turns into movement, the step that eventually leads to things like dancing.\u201d<\/p>\n
The team designed the experiment to fill this knowledge gap. \u201cFew to no one had ever measured brain activity and spontaneous body movement at the same time in babies this young,\u201d Nguyen told PsyPost. \u201cWe also wanted to do something prior studies couldn\u2019t: include a proper control.\u201d<\/p>\n
By comparing real songs to scrambled versions of those same songs, the scientists could test specific reactions. \u201cWe could ask whether infants respond specifically to musical structure rather than just to sound in general,\u201d Nguyen said.<\/p>\n
Another reason for the study was to explore the specific effects of musical pitch. High-pitched sounds are a prominent feature of the way adults naturally speak and sing to infants. The authors wanted to test whether high-pitched music would naturally enhance brain responses and increase physical movement compared to lower-pitched music.<\/p>\n
To examine these developmental stages, the scientists recruited 79 infants who were born full-term and had no known developmental delays. The infants were divided into three distinct age groups. The sample included 26 three-month-olds, 26 six-month-olds, and 27 twelve-month-olds. A control group of 26 young adults also participated to provide a baseline for adult brain responses.<\/p>\n
The experimental procedure involved having the infants sit in a baby seat facing a computer screen. To keep the infants calm and engaged, the screen played a silent video of blooming flowers slowly fading in and out. As the infants watched the screen, audio speakers placed on either side of the monitor played various musical clips.<\/p>\n
The audio stimuli consisted of short instrumental choruses from two popular children\u2019s songs. The researchers created four different versions of these songs to test different sensory reactions. The first version was standard music, featuring a regular melody and a rhythmic bassline.<\/p>\n
The second version was shuffled music, which acted as a control condition. For this version, the researchers scrambled the order of the notes and randomized the timing. This process destroyed the regular beat and melodic structure of the original songs.<\/p>\n
The third and fourth versions maintained the standard musical structure but shifted the pitch. The high-pitch condition moved the melody up an entire octave. The low-pitch condition moved the bassline down an octave. All audio clips were twenty-one seconds long and played at the exact same speed and volume.<\/p>\n
As the participants listened to the audio clips, the researchers recorded their brain activity using electroencephalography. This non-invasive method involves placing a cap with small sensors on the head to measure the electrical signals produced by the brain. The scientists looked specifically for temporary spikes in brain activity that occur in direct response to a specific sensory event, such as the start of a musical note.<\/p>\n
At the same time, three video cameras recorded the infants from frontal, diagonal, and side angles. To analyze the video data, the researchers used a specialized computer program that automatically tracks body movements without the need for physical motion-capture markers.<\/p>\n
\u201cA methodological point I\u2019m proud of: rather than treating movement as a single lump of \u2018activity,\u2019 we used markerless video tracking and decomposed full-body movement into distinct components, like rocking, swaying, clapping-like motions, kicking, and so on,\u201d Nguyen said. \u201cTo our knowledge that hadn\u2019t been done with infant data before, and it let us see which movements music actually evokes, not just how much babies moved.\u201d<\/p>\n
Nguyen also expressed gratitude for the participants. \u201cI\u2019d also genuinely thank the families who took part,\u201d she noted. \u201cInfant EEG plus video is demanding to collect, and none of this exists without their patience.\u201d<\/p>\n
When the researchers analyzed the brain data, they found that infants across all three age groups showed heightened neural responses to the standard music compared to the shuffled music. The brain waves of the three-month-olds, six-month-olds, and twelve-month-olds all showed stronger electrical spikes when listening to organized musical structures.<\/p>\n
\u201cThe brain is ready for music remarkably early, and even 3-month-olds show stronger responses to real music than to scrambled music, so the encoding of musical structure is already in place in the first months of life,\u201d Nguyen explained.<\/p>\n
In contrast, the disorganized sounds did not elicit the same level of neural processing. \u201cThe scrambled music barely produced a clear evoked brain response at all, even though, acoustically, those sounds should trigger one,\u201d Nguyen said. \u201cWe think this reflects something higher-level: when a sound stream has no learnable structure, the brain seems to disengage from it rather than keep tracking it closely.\u201d<\/p>\n
The movement data painted a different picture of physical maturation. \u201cGuided by the perception literature, which shows how early and how finely infants pick up on musical structure, we expected to see at least some difference in how much babies moved to music versus scrambled music across all ages, even if that movement wasn\u2019t coordinated with the beat,\u201d Nguyen said.<\/p>\n
\u201cWe didn\u2019t: a clear difference only appeared at 12 months,\u201d she continued. \u201cThat genuinely surprised us.\u201d For the oldest infants, hearing structured music triggered specific upper-body motions like arm pedaling, front-to-back rocking, and side swaying.<\/p>\n
\u201cOnly by 12 months did babies reliably move more to music than to scrambled music, with rocking, swaying, and clapping-like movements,\u201d Nguyen stated. \u201cAnd at no age did we see movements actually synchronized to the beat.\u201d<\/p>\n
This reveals a gap between perception and physical coordination. \u201cSo the headline is that hearing music and moving to it develop on different timelines: the brain is already processing music well before the body learns to organize itself in response,\u201d Nguyen said. \u201cThe capacity to truly coordinate movement with music, the seed of dance, is still developing past the first birthday.\u201d<\/p>\n
Regarding the effects of pitch, the results showed interesting variations across the different age groups. Only the six-month-old infants exhibited stronger brain responses to the high-pitched music compared to the low-pitched music.<\/p>\n
Interestingly, the movement analysis showed that high-pitched music was generally better at predicting spontaneous infant movements than low-pitched music across all three age groups. \u201cThe pitch result was also puzzling in an interesting way: a stronger brain response to high-pitched versus low-pitched music showed up only at 6 months, yet high-pitched music predicted movement at every age we tested, and we don\u2019t have a tidy explanation for that mismatch,\u201d Nguyen said.<\/p>\n
While this study provides new insights into early child development, the authors emphasize that it maps natural growth rather than providing actionable advice for parents. \u201cThis is basic science about when these abilities emerge in development, not a recipe for boosting it,\u201d Nguyen explained.<\/p>\n
\u201cThe effects are real and consistent, but they describe when certain responses first appear, not a measurable skill you can train or a benchmark an individual baby should hit,\u201d she added. \u201cMusic is clearly a rich, engaging stimulus for infants, and that\u2019s a reasonable takeaway for caregivers and educators, but I\u2019d be cautious about any claim that a specific kind of music makes babies smarter or more coordinated. We\u2019re characterizing a natural developmental trajectory.\u201d<\/p>\n
The researchers also highlighted a few potential misinterpretations regarding infant dancing. \u201cWe found no evidence that infants, at any age, including 12 months, moved in time with the beat,\u201d Nguyen said. \u201cTheir movements were related to changes in the music\u2019s intensity, but they weren\u2019t synchronized to it. Coordinated, beat-aligned movement appears to develop later, into toddlerhood and childhood.\u201d<\/p>\n
A few methodological factors also matter when interpreting the results. \u201cThe study is cross-sectional, testing different babies at each age, not the same babies followed over time, so it captures the group trajectory, not individual development,\u201d Nguyen pointed out.<\/p>\n
The physical setup of the experiment also influenced the types of motions the cameras captured. \u201cInfants were tested seated, which made upper-body movements, like rocking, swaying, clapping, easier and resting feet harder to read, so it\u2019s not a complete picture of how a baby might move freely,\u201d she said.<\/p>\n
Additionally, the authors used only two children\u2019s songs, suggesting a need to test a wider variety of audio stimuli. The shuffling process used to create the disorganized music altered both the pitch and the timing at the exact same time. \u201cBecause our scrambling disrupted both timing and pitch at once, we can\u2019t yet separate whether the brain\u2019s stronger response to music reflects sensitivity to rhythm, to melody, or to both,\u201d Nguyen explained.<\/p>\n
Future research could address these factors and expand on the current findings. \u201cThere are several long-term goals worth chasing,\u201d Nguyen stated. \u201cWe want to follow this trajectory past the first year, into the window where movement actually starts to coordinate with music, to catch the transition from moving near the beat to moving on it.\u201d<\/p>\n
The scientists also plan to explore how the environment influences these physical reactions. \u201cWe\u2019re also interested in observing this effect in more naturalistic contexts, such as when infants are at home or listening to music together with others,\u201d Nguyen added. \u201cWe\u2019d also like to disentangle rhythm from pitch with stimuli designed for that purpose, and to connect these behavioral changes to the maturation of the brain pathway that links hearing to movement, the dorsal auditory stream.\u201d<\/p>\n
The study, \u201cDevelopment of Auditory and Spontaneous Movement Responses to Music over the First Postnatal Year<\/a>,\u201d was authored by Trinh Nguyen, F\u00e9lix Bigand, Susanne Reisner, Atesh Koul, Roberta Bianco, Gabriela Markova, Stefanie Hoehl, and Giacomo Novembre.<\/p>\n<\/p><\/div>\n \u2018 The preceding article may include information circulated by third parties \u2019 <\/em><\/p>\n \u2018 Some details of this article were extracted from the following source www.psypost.org \u2019 <\/em><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"New research published in the journal eLife provides evidence that babies begin processing the structure of music very early in life, but their ability to physically coordinate their bodies to a musical beat takes much longer to develop. The findings suggest that while the infant brain can distinguish between organized songs and disorganized sounds, complex […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":2469666,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"om_disable_all_campaigns":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"jnews-multi-image_gallery":[],"jnews_single_post":[],"jnews_primary_category":[],"jnews_social_meta":[],"footnotes":""},"categories":[25179],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-2469665","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-music"],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"https:\/\/celebrity.land\/en\/wp-content\/uploads\/2026\/06\/New-study-reveals-how-infants-brains-and-bodies-respond-to.jpg","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/celebrity.land\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2469665","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/celebrity.land\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/celebrity.land\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/celebrity.land\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/celebrity.land\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=2469665"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/celebrity.land\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2469665\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":2469667,"href":"https:\/\/celebrity.land\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2469665\/revisions\/2469667"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/celebrity.land\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/2469666"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/celebrity.land\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=2469665"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/celebrity.land\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=2469665"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/celebrity.land\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=2469665"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}