Until recently, it was thought that listening to music by pregnant women only calmed them down. However, it turns out that it is an important channel of contact with the unborn child. What music should be listened to during pregnancy?
The right choice of music has a beneficial effect on the psyche of a woman and her whole body. What can music do?
A problem accompanying pregnancy is a higher level of stress. Appropriate music leads to a reduction of this negative factor, and thus to a reduction of anxiety or fear
Regular listening to music during pregnancy, according to researchers at the Max Planck Institute in Munich, also protects women from hypertension, which is common in this state. Thus, future mothers who have a problem with this parameter can avoid health problems
It turns out that musical taste during pregnancy can be very specific and different from what a woman preferred before. In particular, her sensitivity to low, high and inharmonious sounds increases, so it is worth to take this into account when composing a pregnancy playlist
More mysterious, however, are the relationships between a mother’s music listening and her child’s fetal development. Recent research points to some interesting correlations!
A baby in the womb begins to respond to sounds as early as 4 or 5 months. The membranes dampen most of these sounds, but the baby still perceives some of them. This is especially true of rhythm and low-frequency sounds. For example, the sounds of the bassoon
It turns out that not only does the foetus respond better or worse to particular melodies while in the womb, but the baby after birth is able to respond particularly vividly to certain sequences of sounds that it often heard while in its mother’s belly
Listening to well-chosen melodies during the prenatal period can be a tool for early music therapy and benefit the future. Children treated in this way are often calmer, more attentive, learn their first words more quickly, and show creative abilities.
It is this genre of music that is recommended by far the most for moms-to-be and the babies developing in their wombs. Especially often recommended are:
Of course, listening to classical music by a future mother does not guarantee that she will have a child-melome. In fact, it is not always this kind of music that appeals to a woman’s taste, or even that of a child, who may already express his or her disapproval in the womb.
At the International Congress of the Association of Music and Medicine in Barcelona (2018), the results of a study by Spanish scientists on the behavior of more than 300 fetuses (mouth and tongue movements were assessed) to 15 songs representing three musical genres (classical, traditional and pop-rock) were presented. It turned out that:
Mozart’s Eine kleine Nachtmusik was the clear winner, but among the pop songs, YMCA Village People and Bohemian Rhapsody by the immortal band Queen also did quite well. Unfortunately, Adele and Shakira did not find fans among the youngest
Main photo of the article: photo by Freestocks, source: unsplash.com
