What Babies Listen To
Love Music More · hosted by Luke F. Walton · Solo episode
The podcast feed is titled Love Music More with Scoobert Doobert. Scoobert Doobert is Luke F. Walton's primary music project.
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Host note
A 2026 study looked at babies in the first two days of life and asked whether they can already predict music. I use that to ask what the prediction says about music itself.
The comparison is a real phrase against a scrambled one. The newborns showed stronger neural responses when an expected next step was cut off. They were forming expectations about rhythm and melody from the phrase in front of them, from its own vocabulary, not from a lifetime of songs. I had thought that kind of statistical listening showed up later, in some deeper phase of brain development. It is there on day zero.
What I will not let the study become is a proof that music is a universal language. Consonance, an out-of-place pitch, the pleasantness people treat as physics: I do not get a clean newborn result for that. Timing and surprise light up. A brain can keep a musical context and react when the context breaks. That is the finding. It is already a lot.
The week before, on Fishbowls of Influence, the question was whether a chord is good or bad outside the culture that trained the ear. This episode is the other end of that. Before the fishbowl, is there already a listener? The week after, Monkey Studies takes the same question to rhythm, and to rhesus macaques.
Selected moments
- Day zero I start from a 2026 study of babies in the first two days, and from the question of what a prediction that early would mean.
- Phrase against scramble I walk through the comparison: a real musical phrase, and a scrambled control.
- The cut-off next step I stay on the result that matters: stronger neural responses when an expected continuation is cut off.
- The phrase's own vocabulary I argue they are building expectations inside the phrase, about rhythm and melody, not from a life of songs.
- Not a universal language I refuse the leap from that result to music as a universal language, and I do not claim a newborn consonance effect.
- Before the fishbowl I set this next to the week before, on whether pleasant chords exist outside the culture that trained the ear.
FAQ
Can newborns predict music?
On the 2026 study I talk through here, babies in the first two days showed stronger neural responses when an expected next step in a phrase was cut off, compared with a scrambled version. They were tracking rhythm and melody inside that phrase. I do not treat that as proof they hear an out-of-key note the way a trained listener does.
Does that make music a universal language?
No. That sentence is the one people reach for, and the study does not earn it. What it earns is narrower: from day zero, a brain can keep a musical context and react when the context breaks. Consonance, and the idea of a naturally pleasant chord, belong to the week before this, on Fishbowls of Influence.
How does this connect to the monkey episode?
Monkey Studies is the week after. I take this newborn result and ask the factory-default question again, this time about rhythm and about rhesus macaques. The babies episode is the setup. The monkey episode is the next turn.
Transcript
0:58 What's good everybody?Last episode we talked about the Tsimane peopleand consonance, so the idea of like a harmonyor a chord that sounds pretty or niceor resolves in an expected way.And what I wanted to think about was, okay,if there are cultural differencesas to what music should sound like, what about babies?So I started researching,is there any like newborn babies study on music?Like how, what are we born with?
1:32 Are we born with rhythm?Are we born with melody?Obviously little baby ears, I don't knowif they can fully hear and perceive the thingsthat we can, I would assume no.In the same way that it's hard for a babyto like make out all of the sites that it has.It's kind of like vague blobs.But in the same sense, is there anythingthat is like factory defaultas to that whole baby Mozart kind of thing?
2:00 And I found a really interesting study from this yearthat tested whether or not newborn babiesalready form expectations about musical rhythm and melody.And this is what I thought was most interestingbecause across all of kind of musical culture,there is, there are different sets of expectationbut there are expectations.That's what makes a genre, a genrethat's what makes us be able to play in rhythm.
2:28 And to some degree, I think that's what makes us be ableto listen to each other and communicatejust in terms of language or even hand movements.So breaking expectations, surpriseand how do you even construct a study like this?I thought it was a really cool paperbecause what they did is they had 49 healthyfull-term newborns.Most of them were only zero to two days old.Just also a wild thing to like,
2:53 hey, can you sign up your baby to do a music study?The babies were asleep and they put an EEG on their brainto record the activity.And what they did is they used monophonic, as in a single line of a Bach melody.So this is not testing really complex chordsor anything like that, single melodic line.And the experiment was trying to seeto do the baby brains react to surprise.
3:21 Can they hear these differences in rhythm and pitch?And then can they predictively follow it?But can they use the musical context?So they modeled two kinds of surprise.What is unexpected when the note occurredgiven the timing of the preceding notes?So like when you are, you're playing,dah, dah, dah, dah, dah, dah, dah, dah, dah, dah.Is that, you know, maybe that's unexpectedor just something super simple.
3:56 Do, do, do, do, you know, little unexpected.How unexpected was the pitchgiven the pitches that came before?Like was it a surprising out of keyor out of the scale?So it wasn't necessarily just saying likethe placement was at early, late, high, low.It's kind of saying, did it violate the expectationthat the piece was creating?In the same way that I say, row, row, row your boat.
4:29 It's like, you've got that cultural expectationof what word is going to come next.We developed the same thing every timewe listen to music, every time we play music.It's part of the only ways that we're ableto play in time with each other.We're not actually, we don't have as goodof reaction time as we would needin order to play in the pocket.We have to kind of statistically model each other
4:50 in real time and then lock togetheror lock to a click track.And in the same way with dance,you need to kind of feel the music,feel what's coming and be able to improvise alongwith it.You're connecting the statistical representationof like what's coming to your own physical body.And so these babies, back to the babies,they had to figure out a control.So the only way that you can say anything actually happened
5:17 is if you can do the oppositeand make sure that there's a differencebetween the control,which in this case was just scrambled.They randomized the ordering and timing relationships.So they broke apart the musical structureand they had similar kinds of notes,similar kinds of intervals, things like that,but they didn't behave in the samelike structured sense of musical vocabulary.
5:40 So this is important because maybe they respond simplylike in my example where it comes after a long gapor a pitch jumps out really hard.So like typical surprise style things,which is naturally what I reached forat trying to make the point,but they were trying to control for that effectof not just the jump scare.And they also ran a few different like acoustic variables
6:08 in the analysis to try to separate out those possibilities.So they were able to say like, okay,given that passage, if there was a large gapand then a big sound,maybe we wait that a little bit differentlyor maybe we look at the resultsand take out that outlier.They showed evidence of the prediction,which is kind of crazy.These are two days,zero to two days years old little babies
6:34 and they were able to in the real Bach melodiessay that statistically significant unexpected timesproducing stronger neural responses.That's kind of crazy.So within about 240 to 370 millisecondsafter the unexpected event,the sleeping babies brain reacted.So they're not just reacting to the physical durationbecause that same relationship didn't happenwhen they scrambled out the notes
7:04 and when they took out any of those weird notes.So it appeared like the sleeping brains of these babieswas actually using the preceding musical contextto make estimations.Isn't that crazy?Two days old?And I'm really, I don't know.I think that this is a fascinating thingabout how, you know, how we're wiredand also part of the reason why I think musicis one of the coolest art forms ever.
7:30 You can be a baby and you can still participatein the most bizarre little way,but you're participating in music.You're participating in an art formfrom the day of your birth,the art form of sound and expectation.And also it makes you think about like, what is music?It's like one of the easiest ways to be inclusiveabout that is you are ordering noiseor sound or frequencies.That it is not just the frequency itself,
8:00 it is not just the order itself,it is the combination of those two over time.And you can take things that are seemingly non-musicaland as long as you apply some level of order,it can turn something non-musicallike a bird calls, that's a bad example,like a word, a word, number nine, number nine.It can turn that into music,you can turn something into a sound poem.I like the bird example though,
8:27 is because you can take something that is natural,a waterfall or something like that,and you can turn it into a more or less musical formatfrom like just collection to something that is ordered.And birds are actually a great examplebecause they are singing,they are singing with a song, an intent,a discernible thing that a scientist, a bird, can goand determine what bird is singing that song
8:56 without even visual representation.That's pretty crazy.And these birds are doing the exact same thing, right?Like they are using repeated audio patternsto mate or signal danger or communicate in some ways.And so while we're not as focused onlike identifying a certain type of inner song,we are identifying the same kind of building blocksor abstraction.The baby is able to perceive a difference
9:33 and form a statistical predictionfrom musical context.So my mind is so thoroughly blown by this subjectthat I'm gonna look up more studiesand we can dig even deeper into this next week.So if you're enjoying the series,we can keep going further.But I think that these are really interesting waysof looking at our own selves, our own musicality,the reason why we say musicis a universal language for humanity.
10:00 And not just putting the mysticism,actually getting some science behind itand figuring out why.In the same way, there's some really crazy studiesabout creativity and tinnitus ringing in your earsand all of these other things that I think linkthat what is to be a human, to have a brain like oursand what it is to be a musician and a music fanbecause I really think that the lines between
10:28 someone that enjoys music and someone that makes musicare much more blurred than we think.And I also think every time you have a song in your head,you're repeating that statistical representationthat is inherent in your brain since day zeroand maybe you hate it or maybe you love it.But the act of living inside of musicis the act of being human.I'll stand behind it.If you enjoyed this episode,
10:55 I'd like to invite you to check out my musicat scoobertdoobert.pizza.You can find all of my links thereand I invite you to like and subscribeand five stars on all of the platforms.We're on Spotify and Apple Podcast, YouTube,all that good stuff and I will see you next weekto talk more science and our defaults.What are our default settings?Our factory default as music lovers.Talk to you then.
The transcript above is a reviewed transcript of this episode (JSON). The recording is the Spotify episode.