My 1 year-old loves to dance. If she hears any musical noise, at any time, in any place, a huge smile blossoms across her face, and, propping herself against a couch, chair, or parent’s leg, she begins to bob up and down and stamp her foot. Sometimes, the flood of feeling the music presses into her tiny heart is so overwhelming that she drops on all fours and rocks back and forth, or carefully raises a single leg in a delicate pirouette.
So far, she’s undiscerning in her musical taste. In fact, even non-musical yet rhythmical sounds like the thrumming of the dryer or the rhythm of nursery rhymes will give her the dancing itch. It can’t be resisted: the ponderous little foot begins to pound. The world bursts with a colorful collage of spiraling and twirling sounds streaming about her small curly head, and she hears music everywhere, even in simple daily activities like washing clothes. She wishes to be in sync with the joy of the world.
Mankind’s Love of Patterns
How can this recognition of music (or at least patterned sounds) and the desire to enter into it be so fundamental to human nature that we engage in it even before the dawn of language, and long before the dawn of rationality?Here, we have a mystery, something so deeply a part of ourselves that it is hard to analyze. One answer might be the desire for order and meaning which must be present, in embryonic form, at least, in the smallest of children.
Another reason that music appeals to children and even infants is that it moves in the realm of emotions, which (as every parent knows and sometimes bemoans) are more fully developed in a child from the start than the rational intellect is. Little Noah may not be able to articulate the concepts of sadness, rage, or his ideas of justice, but he most certainly experiences the feelings associated with those things when his desire for more cookies encounters unforeseen obstacles. That may be one reason why music appeals to children at such an early age: music speaks directly to the heart, which is the only language children really know prior to the age of reason.
Aristotle spoke to this emotional power of music in his Politics:
“Rhythm and melody supply imitations of anger and gentleness, and also of courage and temperance, and of all the qualities contrary to these, and of the other qualities of character, which hardly fall short of the actual affections, as we know from our own experience, for in listening to such strains our souls undergo a change. The habit of feeling pleasure or pain at mere representations is not far removed from the same feeling about realities. ... Enough has been said to show that music has a power of forming the character.”
Music Enriches the Young Mind
Musical education can begin early. Though the validity of the so-called “Mozart effect”—which holds that listening to classical music at an early age increases a child’s intelligence—has been challenged by some scientists, studies show that learning to play an instrument, even in children as young as 3 years old, significantly increases a child’s spatial-temporal reasoning. Another study showed that rats who were exposed to Mozart’s music in utero and then for a period of time after birth were able to complete a maze much faster than rats who listened to minimalist music, white noise, or nothing at all.So, if your toddler hears beautiful music and begins to dance, you may want to encourage it and even join in. The child is expressing a part of your humanity, too.