Lullabies of Any Language Relaxes Babies

Calming Babies Down, One Language at a Time

If you’re a new parent, you might find that gently calming lullabies lull your infants to sleep. You might be even surprised to learn that infants aren’t picky, especially if those lullabies are from other cultures, languages, and/or regions.

According to a study done by researchers at Harvard University’s Music Lab, American infants were just as relaxed from lullabies from foreign and unfamiliar languages as they would for familiar languages.

Music Helps Infants Think and Calm Down

Understanding how music affects infants is important because it shows us that children are complex thinkers across emotional situations. Perhaps they already associated these new lullabies with prior experiences with loosely similar voices and instruments with their own families.

Perhaps it is something much more innate, such as a shared universality between many cultures, religions, and regions.

Either way, universalities can prove to be useful, especially when dealing with suddenly fussy babies, for both the child and tired caregiver.

In this experiment, the infants watched animated videos. In those videos, two characters would sing a series of non-lullabies and lullabies.

Some of these songs included a healing song from the Seri of Mexico and a lullaby song from the Highlanders of Scotland, all selected by a cross-cultural panel of adult participants from a previous session at the Music Lab.

A panel of 16 songs from the prior study was selected in this children’s study. The songs covered many languages like Hopi, Western Nahuatl, and Scottish Gaelic, and covered many regions including Central America, the Middle East, and Polynesia.

In the prior study, the adults rated the likelihood that an unfamiliar and foreign song was likely to be either a healing song, a love song, a dance song, or a lullaby.

These songs were chosen by the adults to avoid a selection bias from the researchers themselves. For example, if the researchers chose a song, there might have been an increased likelihood of choosing only songs that reflected many fewer cultures and/or languages.

Assessing the Infants Gently and Quickly

Back to the children’s study, the infants’ relaxation responses to the songs were assessed through heart rate changes, pupil dilation, frequency of blinking, and many more.

Electrodermal activity was performed as well, where the infants’ measure of arousal and excitement was done through electrical resistances found on the infants’ skin. Gaze direction assessed for infant agitation and relaxation.

Measuring for all these parameters was not easy, as infants easily get distracted in about 5 minutes or so, meaning that the researchers had to assess and document quickly.

Overall, when listening to unfamiliar lullabies, most infants experienced decreases in heart rate, pupil dilation and electrodermal activity. This meant that they were the calmest during those times.

Even after the study, the researchers separately asked the parents to listen to both the lullabies and non-lullabies, and the parents would almost always identify which one was the lullaby.

Either way, the findings of the study suggest that infants (and their parents) responded towards a universality found in all lullabies, even if the melodies, words, and/or instruments were unfamiliar.

The next time you want to calm a fussy baby, perhaps playing some calming music from unchartered cultures, regions, and religions is the way to go, especially as we become immersed by the broader world as adventurous adults.

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