And The Rhythm Of Life is a powerful beat

Although in a study on movement it might have been better to use Movement VI of Saint-Saëns' Le carnaval des animaux (this might just be a peculiarly Australian preference), Marcel Zentner and Tuomas Eerola used the Finale with its bouncy eighth note rhythm (along with the last movement of Mozart’s Eine Kleine Nachtmusik) to test whether preverbal infants engage in rhythmic behavior to music.

What they did was to carry out two experiments (in which 120 infants were tested, experiment 1: n = 51; experiment 2: n = 69). To investigate the type of auditory stimulus that best elicited rhythmic engagement, Zentner and Eerola tested infants with excerpts of classical music (the aforementioned Saint-Saëns and Mozart), rhythm-only versions of these excerpts, a children’s song, isochronous drumbeats, and a musical stimulus with rapid tempo shifts. As control stimuli they used prerecorded human speech - adult-directed speech (ADS) in Experiment 1 and infant directed speech (IDS) in experiment 2. Infants were tested on their parent’s lap with parents instructed to try to avoid moving during the experiment (they also wore headphones through which they heard spoken text). Several methods were employed to measure any rhythmic response by the infants. In Experiments 1 and 2, videos of the infants were coded by two independent raters (with inter-rater reliability sampled over a quarter of the ratings, κ=0.84 in Experiment 1 and κ=0.82 in Experiment 2). In Experiment 2, 3D motion capture (Qualisys) was used to facilitate the mapping of movement time onto musical time).


In the results, infant's rhythmic engagement with music, rhythm and speech were compared (check out the figure to the right).








The authors also examined development trends and whether the timing of infants’ rhythmic movements was coordinated with musical time (see this video).

There is a lot more in the paper as well - an exploration of whether the degree to which infants coordinate movement to metrically regular sound patterns is affected by pulse clarity and whether rhythmic engagement and coordination with music induce positive affect.

If you're interested why not read Zentner, M. & Eerola, T (2010). Rhythmic engagement with music in infancy. PNAS, www.pnas.org/cgi/doi/10.1073/pnas.1000121107, I am interested in your comments.