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Singing lullabies to babies has an immediate soothing effect. Photo: Copyright (c) 2022 eggeegg/Shutterstock.
Do we hear music differently across cultures? And does singing to a baby improve their mental health?
These are some of the questions The Music Lab's Principal Investigator psychologist Dr Samuel Mehr is looking to answer.
Based at the University of Auckland and Yale University, the lab's current studies focus on the ability of babies to perceive harmony and melody, and the effects of singing to a baby in the first year of life.
The lab also runs citizen-science experiments such as musical IQ tests, where you can test yourself and contribute via their website.
A recent study from the lab looked at the differences of music processing ability across people from different cultures - or as Mehr puts it, "how they understand the vibrating air that's making it into their auditory cortex".
The study tested participants on remembering melodies, hearing mistunings in voices and whether they could tell if a beat was out of sync - all in all, a person's 'musical IQ'.
Using voluntary online testing - presented in a fun format where users can share their results with their friends on social media - gave Mehr and other scientists at the lab a wealth of diverse data to draw from.
"Because when you make an experiment that is gamified, that is fun for participants to do, they participate in a naturalistic way in their own home, or on their phone, or wherever they happen to be," he says.
"And because they tend to do it in really large numbers, it lets you do the sorts of analysis that you can't do in a brick and mortar laboratory."
Photo: Samuel Mehr
Looking at the recognition of beat synchronisation, the study found the native language of a listener was predictive of whether they were particularly good at the task.
"People who speak tonal languages like Mandarin Chinese or for example Uruba, an African language, they tend to have a little bit of a disadvantage at this sort of beat synchronisation ability," Mehr says.
"Everybody varies in terms of their musical processing abilities and one of the goals of this site is to try and capture that diversity worldwide."
Even the youngest members of the family can take part in these musical experiments - another study looked at the universal nature of the lullaby across different cultures.
Presenting participants with a variety of traditional lullabies from around the world, it was found that both children and adults could easily recognise them as such, despite not understanding the different languages.
"They're sort of mutually understandable. Lullabies are soothing in the same ways across different cultures," Mehr says.
"We've done some experiments where we bring babies into the lab and we play these foreign songs to them and find out that they in fact relax more, their heart rates drop, their electrodermal activity goes down."
As lullabies seemed to have some immediate impacts on calming infants, Mehr said it opened questions on what the long term benefits of music on infants might be.
"In some sense this research project is blazingly obvious but that doesn't mean it's not useful to do," he says.
"A lot of parents in 2023 might not jump to singing to their infants as the first thing to do for their babies. They might grab their phone or buy a toy… because we're in a very content rich environment, there's a lot of stuff you can do with your baby as a parent.
"Parents might not realise, oh I know all these songs, I could just sing to them."