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New research published in the journal eLife provides evidence that babies begin processing the structure of music very early in life, but their ability to physically coordinate their bodies to a musical beat takes much longer to develop. The findings suggest that while the infant brain can distinguish between organized songs and disorganized sounds, complex rhythmic movement emerges gradually. These insights help explain how human musicality transitions from passive listening to active physical engagement over the first year of life.
Musicality generally involves two main components. The first is a sensory component, which involves the ability to perceive and recognize musical patterns. The second is a motor component, which involves the capacity to coordinate physical movements with musical rhythms, such as tapping a foot or dancing.
Scientists understand quite a bit about how the sensory component develops. Research suggests that the human auditory system is sensitive to simple musical regularities from a very young age. However, the physical response to music remains largely unexplored in early child development.
Prior to this recent experiment, no studies had simultaneously tracked brain activity and spontaneous body movements in infants under one year old. To fill this knowledge gap and observe exactly when perception turns into physical action, a team of scientists launched the current investigation. The project was supported by a European Research Council Starting Grant known as MUSICOM. This grant was awarded to Giacomo Novembre, lead researcher of the Neuroscience of Perception and Action Lab at the Italian Institute of Technology in Rome.
The University of Vienna served as a partner on the project by providing access to the infant participants. Quynh Trinh Nguyen, a researcher currently affiliated with Heidelberg University, the Italian Institute of Technology, and the University of Vienna, explained the motivation behind the research.
“Almost everyone, in every culture, listens to music and moves to it, and it feels instinctive,” Nguyen said. “That makes musicality a fascinating window into human nature, but it raises a basic developmental puzzle: we actually know very little about when and how these abilities first appear.”
Nguyen noted that abilities emerging in the first months of life tend to be the ones that matter most for human development. “Music and movement are tied to how infants communicate and bond with their caregivers long before they can speak,” she said. “There’s a good amount of research on how infants perceive music, but far less on how perception turns into movement, the step that eventually leads to things like dancing.”
The team designed the experiment to fill this knowledge gap. “Few to no one had ever measured brain activity and spontaneous body movement at the same time in babies this young,” Nguyen told PsyPost. “We also wanted to do something prior studies couldn’t: include a proper control.”
By comparing real songs to scrambled versions of those same songs, the scientists could test specific reactions. “We could ask whether infants respond specifically to musical structure rather than just to sound in general,” Nguyen said.
Another reason for the study was to explore the specific effects of musical pitch. High-pitched sounds are a prominent feature of the way adults naturally speak and sing to infants. The authors wanted to test whether high-pitched music would naturally enhance brain responses and increase physical movement compared to lower-pitched music.
To examine these developmental stages, the scientists recruited 79 infants who were born full-term and had no known developmental delays. The infants were divided into three distinct age groups. The sample included 26 three-month-olds, 26 six-month-olds, and 27 twelve-month-olds. A control group of 26 young adults also participated to provide a baseline for adult brain responses.
The experimental procedure involved having the infants sit in a baby seat facing a computer screen. To keep the infants calm and engaged, the screen played a silent video of blooming flowers slowly fading in and out. As the infants watched the screen, audio speakers placed on either side of the monitor played various musical clips.
The audio stimuli consisted of short instrumental choruses from two popular children’s songs. The researchers created four different versions of these songs to test different sensory reactions. The first version was standard music, featuring a regular melody and a rhythmic bassline.
The second version was shuffled music, which acted as a control condition. For this version, the researchers scrambled the order of the notes and randomized the timing. This process destroyed the regular beat and melodic structure of the original songs.
The third and fourth versions maintained the standard musical structure but shifted the pitch. The high-pitch condition moved the melody up an entire octave. The low-pitch condition moved the bassline down an octave. All audio clips were twenty-one seconds long and played at the exact same speed and volume.
As the participants listened to the audio clips, the researchers recorded their brain activity using electroencephalography. This non-invasive method involves placing a cap with small sensors on the head to measure the electrical signals produced by the brain. The scientists looked specifically for temporary spikes in brain activity that occur in direct response to a specific sensory event, such as the start of a musical note.
At the same time, three video cameras recorded the infants from frontal, diagonal, and side angles. To analyze the video data, the researchers used a specialized computer program that automatically tracks body movements without the need for physical motion-capture markers.
“A methodological point I’m proud of: rather than treating movement as a single lump of ‘activity,’ we used markerless video tracking and decomposed full-body movement into distinct components, like rocking, swaying, clapping-like motions, kicking, and so on,” Nguyen said. “To our knowledge that hadn’t been done with infant data before, and it let us see which movements music actually evokes, not just how much babies moved.”
Nguyen also expressed gratitude for the participants. “I’d also genuinely thank the families who took part,” she noted. “Infant EEG plus video is demanding to collect, and none of this exists without their patience.”
When the researchers analyzed the brain data, they found that infants across all three age groups showed heightened neural responses to the standard music compared to the shuffled music. The brain waves of the three-month-olds, six-month-olds, and twelve-month-olds all showed stronger electrical spikes when listening to organized musical structures.
“The brain is ready for music remarkably early, and even 3-month-olds show stronger responses to real music than to scrambled music, so the encoding of musical structure is already in place in the first months of life,” Nguyen explained.
In contrast, the disorganized sounds did not elicit the same level of neural processing. “The scrambled music barely produced a clear evoked brain response at all, even though, acoustically, those sounds should trigger one,” Nguyen said. “We think this reflects something higher-level: when a sound stream has no learnable structure, the brain seems to disengage from it rather than keep tracking it closely.”
The movement data painted a different picture of physical maturation. “Guided by the perception literature, which shows how early and how finely infants pick up on musical structure, we expected to see at least some difference in how much babies moved to music versus scrambled music across all ages, even if that movement wasn’t coordinated with the beat,” Nguyen said.
“We didn’t: a clear difference only appeared at 12 months,” she continued. “That genuinely surprised us.” For the oldest infants, hearing structured music triggered specific upper-body motions like arm pedaling, front-to-back rocking, and side swaying.
“Only by 12 months did babies reliably move more to music than to scrambled music, with rocking, swaying, and clapping-like movements,” Nguyen stated. “And at no age did we see movements actually synchronized to the beat.”
This reveals a gap between perception and physical coordination. “So the headline is that hearing music and moving to it develop on different timelines: the brain is already processing music well before the body learns to organize itself in response,” Nguyen said. “The capacity to truly coordinate movement with music, the seed of dance, is still developing past the first birthday.”
Regarding the effects of pitch, the results showed interesting variations across the different age groups. Only the six-month-old infants exhibited stronger brain responses to the high-pitched music compared to the low-pitched music.
Interestingly, the movement analysis showed that high-pitched music was generally better at predicting spontaneous infant movements than low-pitched music across all three age groups. “The pitch result was also puzzling in an interesting way: a stronger brain response to high-pitched versus low-pitched music showed up only at 6 months, yet high-pitched music predicted movement at every age we tested, and we don’t have a tidy explanation for that mismatch,” Nguyen said.
While this study provides new insights into early child development, the authors emphasize that it maps natural growth rather than providing actionable advice for parents. “This is basic science about when these abilities emerge in development, not a recipe for boosting it,” Nguyen explained.
“The effects are real and consistent, but they describe when certain responses first appear, not a measurable skill you can train or a benchmark an individual baby should hit,” she added. “Music is clearly a rich, engaging stimulus for infants, and that’s a reasonable takeaway for caregivers and educators, but I’d be cautious about any claim that a specific kind of music makes babies smarter or more coordinated. We’re characterizing a natural developmental trajectory.”
The researchers also highlighted a few potential misinterpretations regarding infant dancing. “We found no evidence that infants, at any age, including 12 months, moved in time with the beat,” Nguyen said. “Their movements were related to changes in the music’s intensity, but they weren’t synchronized to it. Coordinated, beat-aligned movement appears to develop later, into toddlerhood and childhood.”
A few methodological factors also matter when interpreting the results. “The study is cross-sectional, testing different babies at each age, not the same babies followed over time, so it captures the group trajectory, not individual development,” Nguyen pointed out.
The physical setup of the experiment also influenced the types of motions the cameras captured. “Infants were tested seated, which made upper-body movements, like rocking, swaying, clapping, easier and resting feet harder to read, so it’s not a complete picture of how a baby might move freely,” she said.
Additionally, the authors used only two children’s songs, suggesting a need to test a wider variety of audio stimuli. The shuffling process used to create the disorganized music altered both the pitch and the timing at the exact same time. “Because our scrambling disrupted both timing and pitch at once, we can’t yet separate whether the brain’s stronger response to music reflects sensitivity to rhythm, to melody, or to both,” Nguyen explained.
Future research could address these factors and expand on the current findings. “There are several long-term goals worth chasing,” Nguyen stated. “We want to follow this trajectory past the first year, into the window where movement actually starts to coordinate with music, to catch the transition from moving near the beat to moving on it.”
The scientists also plan to explore how the environment influences these physical reactions. “We’re also interested in observing this effect in more naturalistic contexts, such as when infants are at home or listening to music together with others,” Nguyen added. “We’d also like to disentangle rhythm from pitch with stimuli designed for that purpose, and to connect these behavioral changes to the maturation of the brain pathway that links hearing to movement, the dorsal auditory stream.”
The study, “Development of Auditory and Spontaneous Movement Responses to Music over the First Postnatal Year,” was authored by Trinh Nguyen, Félix Bigand, Susanne Reisner, Atesh Koul, Roberta Bianco, Gabriela Markova, Stefanie Hoehl, and Giacomo Novembre.