It’s findings like these which have reinforced Dr Fred Schwartz’s faith in the value of music for babies. Dr Schwartz is an anesthetist in the neonatal ward at Piedmont Hospital in Atlanta, Georgia.
“What we’re doing with music is using music to cause a stress reduction for babies,” he says, “and this has been replicated in a number of studies. Music can change the behavioral state of an agitated premature baby that perhaps is thrashing the arms, and consuming precious oxygen and calories. So these babies are often blue.
When you play music, they stop thrashing, they go into a restful awake or asleep state, and their oxygen saturation actually goes up right before your eyes. The cost of intensive care for premature babies in the United States is about $3.5 billion per year. If we can incorporate music into our neonatal intensive care units, we can perhaps save 10% or 15% of the total expenditure.”
Since the beginning of 1998, every premature baby now receives music as therapy as a matter of course. “We have a system where we have a CD player for every baby. The CD player is mounted on the wall and then the output of that goes into a little computer speaker. The total cost of our music system for every baby is between $400 and $500, and this is a fairly automatic system where all the nurse needs to do is just press the button, No.l CD; No.2 CD,” continues Dr Schwartz.
“We like to start out with something rather simple, perhaps similar to what the babies have been hearing in the womb, so for most premature babies in our intensive care unit, we use womb sound, and female vocal sound music, perhaps for the 20-week to 29-gestational-week premature babies.
“Then they start being able to respond to a little bit more complex music, not over-orchestrated but a lovely lullaby is what these babies respond to very well. And perhaps a classical arrangement that is arranged very, very simply, so that the baby is not overloaded with their senses.
“You can watch the monitors, and within one minute you can see the heart rate going down, the oxygen saturation going up and often a behavioral change fairly immediately. Levels of oxygen in the blood go up and they stay up, and this has long-term consequences as far as helping that baby grow faster,” concludes Dr Schwartz.
Dr Tony Wigram, of the University of Aalborg in Denmark, is President of the World Federation of Music Therapy. Talking about babies and music, he points out that lullabies are frequently sung in a soft, gentle voice with gentle timbres: “Whoever heard of a lullaby being played on an oboe, because it’s got a more precise and hard timbre. And the music, the melody of a lullaby is quite often a series of short repetitive phrases. So the repetition of the melody and the way the melody may go up a little bit, but then go down, is very significant in its effect.”
There has also been some good research on these parameters by an English psychologist John Sloboda, who wrote a very interesting book and several articles on the emotional effects and the language of music.
He has researched the musical components that could cause people to have certain reactions like changes in their mood, or feelings of going to sleep, or feelings of sadness. He has also analyzed these parameters and the reasons why music can make people feel melancholy, mournful, or sad.
Dr Tony Wigram believes that there are clear, parameters in the music, in the falling phrases and the way the melody is structured, and in the repetitive minor rhythm of the harmony. He believes that one can identify the effect of the music by the parameters. And that’s why the study of music and the skill of being able to use music is essentially music therapy. “Music therapists need to be skilled musicians, because they need to use those parameters in their interactions with clients,” says Dr Wigram.
There is some evidence suggesting that in the baroque era, some compositions were actually written to match the human heartbeat in the belief that music has healing properties to which the body is able to respond. But how the music really does affect the brain was the research interest of Professor Dale Taylor, Director of Music Therapy Studies at the University of Wisconsin-Eau Claire in the United States.