‘Part of our biological toolkit’: newborn babies can anticipate rhythm in music, researchers find

Researchers at the Italian Institute of Technology have discovered that newborn babies can anticipate rhythm in music. The study, published in Plos Biology, used EEG to track brain activity in sleeping newborns as they listened to original Bach compositions and shuffled versions. The findings revealed that babies' brains responded to rhythmic surprises in the original music, indicating an ability to track and predict rhythmic patterns. However, their brains did not react to melodic surprises or rhythmic/melodic surprises in the shuffled music. The research suggests that rhythm processing may be a fundamental, innate human ability, while melody processing develops later in life. This could explain why rhythmic patterns tend to be more universal across cultures than melodies.

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