Psychological functions of music in infancy and beyond
In 1871\, Darwin wrote\, "As neither the enjoyment nor the capacity of producing musical notes are faculties of the least use to man . .. they must be ranked among the most mysterious with which he is endowed." Infants and parents worldwide engage their mysterious musical faculties ea gerly and frequently\, unlike any other species\, and have done so througho ut recorded history. Why should this be? In this talk I propose that infant -directed song functions as an honest signal of parental investment (Mehr & Krasnow\, 2017). Three lines of work support this proposal. First\, I show that the genomic imprinting disorders Prader-Willi and Angelman syndromes\ , which cause an altered psychology of parental investment\, are associated with an altered psychology of music (Mehr et al.\, 2017\; Kotler et al.\, 2019). Second\, I analyze ethnographic texts and audio recordings with tool s of data science\, finding that vocal music appears in 100% of a represent ative sample of human societies and is reliably associated with the care of infants and children therein. Moreover\, infant-directed songs are recogni zable by massive cohorts of naïve listeners\, a result driven by acoustic f eatures of the singing that consistently differentiate the infant-directed songs from other songs\, worldwide (Mehr et al.\, in press\; Mehr et al.\, 2018). Last\, I show that infants are sensitive to these reliably-occurring acoustic features: despite their unfamiliarity\, infants are calmed by for eign lullabies (Bainbridge & Youngers et al.\, in prep). These findings con verge on a psychological function of music in infancy that may underlie mor e general features of the human music faculty\, laying the foundation for a comprehensive psychology of music.
Dr. Sam
uel Mehr is a Research Associate in the Department of Psychology at Harvard
University\, where he directs the Music Lab. The lab's research asks how a
nd why the design of the human mind leads us to perceive\, create\, and eng
age with music across human societies and across the lifespan. Originally a
musician\, Sam earned a B.M. in Music Education from the Eastman School of
Music\, followed by a doctorate in Human Development at Harvard under the
mentorship of Elizabeth Spelke\, Steven Pinker\, and Howard Gardner. You ca
n learn more about Music Lab research and participate in experiments at http://themusiclab.org.