Person:

Mehr, Samuel

This study had three goals: (1) to investigate the potential connection between music experiences in early childhood and later music making as a parent, (2) to report the frequency of music making in a sample of American families with young children along with parents’ opinions on possible benefits of music classes, and (3) to compare frequency data to two previous studies. Parents of 4-year-old children were surveyed on the frequency of music activities in the home, their early arts experiences, and a variety of topics concerning arts education. An intergenerational link was found: The frequency of parental song in childhood significantly predicted parents’ later music behaviors with their own children, adjusting for other aspects of the early artistic environment. Parents reported high frequencies of music activities in the home, with most parents singing or playing recorded music to their children on a daily basis. Notably, the frequency of parental music making was unrelated to family income or to participation in music classes. Parents’ opinions on the effects of music education reflected a widespread belief that music classes confer a variety of nonmusical benefits.

Young children regularly engage in musical activities, but the effects of early music education on children’s cognitive development are unknown. While some studies have found associations between musical training in childhood and later nonmusical cognitive outcomes, few randomized controlled trials (RCTs) have been employed to assess causal effects of music lessons on child cognition and no clear pattern of results has emerged. We conducted two RCTs  with preschool children investigating the cognitive effects of a brief series of music classes, as  compared to a similar but non-musical form of arts instruction (visual arts classes, Experiment 1) or to a no-treatment control (Experiment 2). Consistent with typical preschool arts enrichment programs, parents attended classes with their children, participating in a variety of developmentally appropriate arts activities. After six weeks of class, we assessed children’s skills  in four distinct cognitive areas in which older arts-trained students have been reported to excel: spatial-navigational reasoning, visual form analysis, numerical discrimination, and receptive vocabulary. We initially found that children from the music class showed greater spatial-navigational ability than did children from the visual arts class, while children from the visual arts class showed greater visual form analysis ability than children from the music class (Experiment 1). However, a partial replication attempt comparing music training to a no-treatment control failed to confirm these findings (Experiment 2), and the combined results of  the two experiments were negative: overall, children provided with music classes performed no better than those with visual arts or no classes on any assessment. Our findings underscore the need for replication in RCTs, and suggest caution in interpreting the positive findings from past studies of cognitive effects of music instruction.

I explore music's early role in social cognition, testing the hypothesis that infants interpret singing as a social signal. Over six experiments, I examine 5- and 11-month-old infants' social responses to new people who sing familiar or unfamiliar songs to them. I manipulate song familiarity with three training methods: infants learn songs from a parent; from a musical toy; or from an unfamiliar adult who sings first in person and subsequently via video chat. I use two main outcome measures: a test of visual preference for the singer of a familiar song; and, in older infants, a more explicitly social test of selective reaching for objects associated with and endorsed by novel individuals. I also test infants' memory for the songs they hear in these studies. I find that infants garner social information from the songs they hear, which they subsequently act upon in the context of social interaction; when songs are not learned in a social context, infants recall them in great detail after long delays. These results demonstrate a social function of music in early development. Music is not just pleasurable noise: it is a member of a class of behaviors, including language, accent, and food preference, that reliably inform infants' social behavior.

Virtuosi impress audiences with their musical expressivity and with their theatrical flair. How do listeners use this auditory and visual information to judge performance quality? Both musicians and laypeople report a belief that sound should trump sight in the judgment of music performance, but surprisingly, their actual judgments reflect the opposite pattern. In a recent study, when presented with 6-second videos of music competition performers, listeners accurately guessed the winners only when the videos were muted. Here, we successfully replicate this finding in a highly-powered sample but then demonstrate that the sight-over-sound effect holds only under limited conditions. When using different videos from comparable performances, in a forced-choice task, listeners' judgments were at or below chance. And when differences in performance quality were made clearer, listeners' judgments were most accurate when they could hear the music—without audio, performance was at chance. Sight therefore does not necessarily trump sound in the judgment of music performance.

We present a theory of the origin and evolution of infant-directed song, a form of music found in many cultures. After examining the ancestral ecology of parent-infant relations, we propose that infant-directed song arose in an evolutionary arms race between parents and infants, stemming from the dynamics of parent-offspring conflict. We describe testable predictions that follow from this theory, consider some existing evidence for them, and entertain the possibility that infant-directed song could form the basis for the development of other, more complex forms of music.