05.21
The ears of a fetus are fully functional at twenty weeks, but an infant’s brain takes months or years to be fully functional.
Inside the womb the fetus hears sounds like the heartbeat of its mother.
A year after they are born, children recognize and prefer music they were exposed to in the womb.
According to Dr. Livitin, author of This is Your Brain on Music, the process goes something like this:
“You wake up from a deep sleep and open your eyes. The distant regular beating at the periphery of your hearing is still there. You rub your eyes with your hands, but you can’t make out any shapes of forms. Time passes, but how long? Half and hour? One hour?
“Then you hear a different but recognizable sound—an amorphous, moving, wiggly sound with fast beating, a pounding that you can feel in your feet. The sounds start and stop without definition. Gradually building up and dying down, they weave together with no clear beginnings or endings.
“These familiar sounds are comforting, you’ve heard them before. As you listen, you have a vague notion of what will come next, and it does, even as the sounds remain remote and muddled, as though you’re listening underwater.”
A fetus also hears music. A year after they are born, children recognize and prefer music they were exposed to in the womb.
Moreover, young infants seem to prefer fast, upbeat music to slow music.
How do we know this? In one experiment, mothers repeatedly played a certain piece of music (classical, reggae, Top 40 or world beat) during the last 3 months of their pregnancy. After birth, the mothers did not play this particular music for a year. At one year, the infants listened to both the music they heard in the womb and a novel piece of music in two different speakers. They looked longer at the speaker that was playing the music they heard in the womb than the other music.
Moreover, young infants seem to prefer fast, upbeat music to slow music.
Mothers take note: the music you listen to while pregnant does impact your child. So does the music you listen to during years one and two. What happens then?
That’s another story.
Dr. Rohn Kessler, Ed. D.
Dear Sir
Iam a Sudanese Music Therapist
I like to hear the voices , which the child hears inside the mothers womb. So can you help me where Ican find that.
thank you and good wishes
Hi Hassan,
Thank you for the interest in this article. Yes, it is a fact that the fetus can indeed hear. Newborns display a preference for the sound of their mother’s own mother’s voice. Research confirms that newborns suck more vigorously on a pacifier to turn on a recording of its mother’s voice compared to that of a strange woman’s similar voice.
Newborns in all cultures are seem to be sensitive to high-pitched and melodic sounds in the human voice. This may explain why people in all cultures speak to infants in the slow-paced and simple baby talk.
Like you, I would love to hear the actual sounds and voices that the fetus hears and processes in the womb. To my knowledge, this is not yet happening, but I hope some of that knowledge will be available to us soon.
Do you have any other comments or questions?
All the Best,
Dr. Rohn Kessler