Summary: New research provides initial insights into how the developing brain gradually transforms music into spontaneous motion. The study monitored infants using simultaneous electroencephalogram (EEG) brain mapping and automated video motion-tracking.
The data revealed that while the human brain processes structured music as early as three months of age, the physical drive to dance to a beat emerges only toward the end of the first year of life.
Key Facts
- The Dual Auditory-Motor Audit: This research addresses a massive historical gap by being among the first to measure real-time infant brain activity and spontaneous physical movements simultaneously in response to music.
- The Inverted Music Catalyst: Researchers played three distinct audio formats to the infants: instrumental child refrains (“music”), structurally randomized versions of the same songs (“shuffled music”), and pitch-altered variations. The shuffled music intentionally disrupted predictable rhythmic structures to test the infants’ focus.
- Universal Early Processing: EEG tracking unmasked that infants in all three age groups (3, 6, and 12 months) displayed significantly enhanced event-related potentials (ERPs) and auditory steady-state responses (ASSRs) when listening to real music versus shuffled music. This proves that the biological architecture required to decode musical structure is online early in infancy.
- The 12-Month Motion Milestone: Despite processing music early, a stark behavioral divide emerged. Only the 12-month-old infants exhibited a significant spike in spontaneous physical movement when listening to structured music compared to shuffled music. The 3- and 6-month-olds showed no statistical difference in movement between the audio types.
- The 10 Principal Movements of Infancy: Using an open-source motion-tracking software called DeepLabCut paired with Principal Component Analysis (PCA), the team categorized infant gestures into 10 explicit Principal Movements (PMs):
- Front-back rocking
- Side sway
- Proto-clapping
- Leg-kicking
- Up-down rocking
- Arm-pedalling
- Feet-kicking
- Whole-body wiggling
- Feet-shuffling
- Feet-pedalling
- The Upper-Body Dance Wave: The data models revealed that a 12-month-old’s “dance” response specifically favors the upper body and limbs. Their increased movement was driven primarily by front-back rocking, side swaying, proto-clapping, up-down rocking, and arm-pedalling. Lower-body movements remained consistent across all musical states.
- Maturation of the Dorsal Stream: Lead author Trinh Nguyen attributes this transition to the steady maturation of the dorsal auditory stream in the brain, the specialized neural pathway responsible for bridging auditory perception with motor output, rhythmic entrainment, and beat perception.
- The Absence of Rhythmic Synchronization: Interestingly, infants in none of the age groups showed any evidence of coordinating their movements in time with the actual beat of the music. This reveals that human motor control is refined in distinct evolutionary steps: the infant brain first learns to activate muscles in response to a sound structure, while the ability to synchronize that movement to the beat develops later.
Source: eLife
Researchers have discovered that music begins to shape how we move within the first year of life.
Their study, published previously as a Reviewed Preprint in eLife and appearing today as the final Version of Record, provides insights into how the developing brain gradually transforms music into spontaneous movements.
It suggests that while our brains are able to process music early in infancy, spontaneous movements to music increase only towards the end of the first year, and coordinating these movements in time with the beat develops later still. eLife’s editors describe the work as important, with compelling results that will be of significant interest to researchers studying music processing and how perception translates into action.
Musicality – our penchant for perceiving, appreciating, and producing music – is increasingly recognized as a fundamental aspect of human nature. At the heart of musicality is our engagement with music, which can be broken down into two components of neurocognitive development: a sensory component – the ability to perceive and recognise music – and a motor component – the ability to move (in time) to music. But when and how we develop musicality as infants remains largely unknown.
“This lack of knowledge is partly due to the fact that few to no studies have explored brain activity and spontaneous movements in response to music at the same time,” explains lead author Trinh Nguyen, Affiliated Researcher in the Neuroscience of Perception and Action Lab at the Istituto Italiano di Tecnologia (Italian Institute of Technology; IIT), Rome, Italy, and Senior Research Fellow at the University of Vienna, Austria. “Studying both the sensory and motor components of musicality in infants would give us a better understanding of how we learn to transform the perception of music into movement.”
To address this gap, Nguyen and colleagues played music to infants – 79 in total, aged three, six and 12 months old – and took EEG recordings and movement measurements to understand their neural (auditory) and motor responses, respectively. The music included instrumental refrains of children’s songs (referred to simply as ‘music’), shuffled versions of the same songs (‘shuffled music’), and high and low-pitched versions of the songs, as pitch may play a role in auditory-motor engagement in infancy.
From the infants’ EEG recordings, the team extracted event-related potentials (ERPs) – an averaging of the infants’ neural responses to pinpoint the precise timing of the brain’s response to each tone in the music – and auditory steady state responses (ASSRs) – a measure of how the brain responds to continuous sounds.
When they compared ERPs that were elicited by ‘music’ to those elicited by ‘shuffled music’, they found that all age groups had an enhanced auditory response to ‘music’, indicating that music processing starts early in development. This finding is in line with one of their hypotheses: that auditory responses would be enhanced when triggered by music compared to shuffled music. This is based on the notion that musical structure, which was disrupted in the shuffled music, is essential to attract infants’ attention towards predictable events.
The researchers then estimated and compared the infants’ spontaneous movements in response to the music types using automated video-based motion-tracking, specifically open-source software called DeepLabCut. Applying a dimensionality reduction technique called principal component analysis, they categorised these movements into 10 principal movements (PMs) including: front-back rocking, side sway, proto-clapping, leg-kicking, up-down rocking, arm-pedalling, feet-kicking, whole-body wiggling, feet-shuffling, and feet-pedalling.
A data modelling technique highlighted a significant interaction between the type of music and age group, showing that only 12-month-olds exhibited higher quantities of movement in response to ‘music’ compared to ‘shuffled music’ across all PMs.
When the team explored these movements further, they found that this response involved mostly movements of the upper body and/or upper limbs – specifically front-back rocking, side sway, proto-clapping, up-down rocking, and arm pedalling.
In comparison, infants aged three and six months old did not exhibit significantly different quantities of movement in response to ‘music’ vs ‘shuffled music’ in any of the PMs. These results were unchanged across all age groups when the researchers compared their movements in response to the high and low-pitched versions of the music.
“Across the first year of life, infants seem to consistently move their lower body while slowly increasing their capacity for more complex upper-body and whole-body movements while seated, as we saw in the 12-month-olds,” Nguyen explains.
“We believe this increasing complexity is linked to the gradual maturation of the dorsal auditory stream in the brain, a pathway that has previously been suggested to play a crucial role in rhythmic entrainment and beat perception.”
Notably, the team also found there was no evidence that infants of any age coordinated their movements in time with the music. This points to a gradual refinement of human motor control: the system first develops the capacity to control individual muscles, while the capacity for more coordinated, whole-body movements follows later.
“We’ve shown that, much like the auditory encoding of music, moving to music emerges early in development. This may reflect a biological or early-developing predisposition that eventually leads to dance-like behaviours, although these motor responses remain underdeveloped before 12 months of age,” concludes senior author Giacomo Novembre, Principal Investigator in the Neuroscience of Perception and Action Lab at IIT.
“This work provides initial insights into how the developing brain gradually transforms music into spontaneous movements. Future research is now needed to extend our characterisation of music-driven movement beyond the first year of life and explore what continues to be its mysterious functional significance.”
Key Questions Answered:
A: While an infant’s auditory cortex is fully capable of recognizing and enjoying musical structures within the first few months of life, their brain hasn’t yet built the physical bridge needed to turn those sounds into intentional movement. Moving to music requires a specialized neural highway called the dorsal auditory stream, which connects sound perception directly to the motor cortex. This brain pathway matures gradually across the first year of life, meaning a baby’s body simply lacks the neural wiring required to dance until they approach their first birthday.
A: To track how the infants moved without human bias, the research team utilized an advanced, open-source AI motion-tracking software called DeepLabCut. By analyzing video recordings of 79 infants listening to different styles of music, the software mapped out the babies’ bodies and used a data technique called Principal Component Analysis to sort their gestures into 10 distinct “Principal Movements,” ranging from side-to-side swaying to leg-kicking. This allowed scientists to mathematically prove that 12-month-olds physically alter their upper-body movements when real music is playing.
A: Surprisingly, no. The study unmasked a very clear boundary in human motor control: although 12-month-old babies will start moving significantly more when they hear structured music, they show zero evidence of actually coordinating their movements to match the timing of the beat. This tells us that the human brain develops musicality in steps. First, the brain learns how to listen to music; next, it learns how to activate individual muscles to express excitement; and only later in childhood does the motor system refine itself enough to lock those movements perfectly in time with the rhythm.
Editorial Notes:
- This article was edited by a Neuroscience News editor.
- Journal paper reviewed in full.
- Additional context added by our staff.
About this music and neurodevelopment research news
Author: Emily Packer
Source: eLife
Contact: Emily Packer – eLife
Image: The image is credited to Neuroscience News
Original Research: Open access.
“Development of auditory and spontaneous movement responses to music over the first postnatal year” by Atesh Koul, Félix Bigand, Gabriela Markova, Giacomo Novembre, Roberta Bianco, Susanne Reisner, Stefanie Hoehl, Trinh Nguyen. eLife
DOI:10.7554/eLife.107088.4
Abstract
Development of auditory and spontaneous movement responses to music over the first postnatal year
Humans across cultures not only share the ability to recognise music but also respond to it through movement. While the sensory encoding of music is well-studied, when and how infants naturally start moving to music is largely unexplored. This study simultaneously investigates infants’ neural (auditory) responses and spontaneous movements to music during the first postnatal year.
Neural activity (EEG) and body kinematics (markerless pose estimation) were recorded from 79 infants (aged 3, 6, and 12 months) listening to refrains of children’s music, along with shuffled, high-pitched, and low-pitched versions of the same songs. Neural data revealed that, across all ages, infants exhibit enhanced auditory responses to music compared to shuffled music, indicating that auditory encoding of music emerges early in development. Movement data revealed a different outcome.
While coarse auditory-motor coupling is present at all ages, more complex structured movement patterns emerge in response to music only by 12 months. Notably, no age group demonstrated evidence of coordinated movements to music. Additionally, enhanced auditory responses to high vs low pitch were only evident at 6 months, while infants’ movements were better predicted by high-pitched compared to low-pitched music at all ages.
This study provides initial insights into how the developing brain gradually transforms music into spontaneous movements of increasing complexity.
