Newborn infants detect the beat in music
Tuesday, January 27, 2009 - 09:49
in Psychology & Sociology
Researchers at the Institute for Psychology of the Hungarian Academy of Sciences and the Institute for Logic, Language and Computation of the University of Amsterdam demonstrated that two to three day old babies can detect the beat in music. This phenomenon - termed ‘beat induction` - is likely to have contributed to music`s origin. It enables such actions as clapping, making music together and dancing to a rhythm. Beat induction is also considered to be uniquely human. Even our closest evolutionary relatives, such as the chimpanzee and bonobo, do not synchronise their behaviour to rhythmic sounds.