Play it again, Dad

Music not only soothes babies but helps strengthen the bond with parents.

- MARC WILSON

We have three children, who are now all adults. In the case of our boy, nominally so, as he's 21 and lives with us. With his house rabbit. His sisters have long since flown the coop.

While there's 11 years between them, they would recognise a lot of similarities in their childhood experiences. We read to them a lot. We played imagination games with them a lot. And we sang to them a lot ... well, I dutifully trudged through the classics (Twinkle, Twinkle, etc), but my wife was always singing to them. If there are any psychological or developmental benefits to a musical house, the credit probably should go to her.

We now know a surprising amount about how infants and children respond to music. And the research we have tells us a lot about infants, but also about music.

Take musical phraseology, for example. In music a phrase is the equivalent of a sentence; a complete musical “thought”. Sure, the composer is the person who generates that “thought”, but there is a structure that transcends individual composers. Mozart is regarded as a pretty competent composer, so he was pretty good at this.