"Crying baby" and "music" don't usually go together, but, hey, interesting science starts with questions no one else thought to ask—in this case, what are the musical contours of a newborn's cry? There had already been provocative research on what sounds a fetus can hear in the womb and what effect that has right after birth, with several research teams finding that newborns prefer their mothers' voices over those of other people, as in studies such as this and this. That makes sense, since Mom's voice is what a baby heard most for nine months. Newborns also prefer their native tongue to other languages for the same reason. (Click here to follow Sharon Begley)
Now an intrepid team of scientists, three from Germany and one from France, has gone an intriguing step further: they have found that newborns cry in their native language. "We have provided evidence that language begins with the very first cry melodies," says Kathleen Wermke of the University of Würzburg, Germany, who led the research.
The reason I call her team "intrepid" is that they recorded 2,500 cries of newborn babies, 30 French and 30 German, between 2 and 5 days old. So a tip of the hat for sacrificing eardrums in pursuit of knowledge.
The idea was to extend the existing findings about what sounds babies can perceive—their native language, their mother's voice—to test what sounds they can create. Once the researchers had their recordings (no babies were harmed in the course of this research! All crying was spontaneous, due to hunger or thirst or general unhappiness rather than pain, as from having blood drawn), they set to work analyzing the cries' melodic qualities.
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