Premature babies: soft music promotes brain development

Lisa Vogel studied departmental journalism with a focus on medicine and biosciences at Ansbach University and deepened her journalistic knowledge in the master's degree in multimedia information and communication. This was followed by a traineeship in the editorial team. Since September 2020 she has been writing as a freelance journalist for

More posts by Lisa Vogel All content is checked by medical journalists.

Soft sounds promote brain development in premature babies. The music has a calming effect on the children: the effect is so strong that new connections are created between the brain regions.

A hectic start in life

If a child is born several weeks too early, their body is not yet fully developed. This also affects the brain. The individual sections are less well networked with one another in premature babies than in other newborns.

Swiss researchers have found that soft music in the premature baby ward could support the brain development of newborns. The usual clinical environment, on the other hand, is not conducive to children's development.

“It's loud and hectic in the intensive care units for newborns,” the authors of the study write. Doors open and close. Strangers scurry around and devices beep. “The mechanical noises can disrupt brain development,” the researchers say.

Music therapy for premature babies

The team around the pediatrician Prof. Petra Hüppi examined the effects of calming music on prematurely born children. They analyzed the brain activity of 39 premature babies with functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) after birth.

20 babies were then given soft music through headphones three times a day at fixed times. One piece of music after waking up, one to fall asleep and one when the children were awake during the day. The researchers mainly used soothing harp sounds and flute playing.

The 19 premature babies in the control group were also given headphones three times a day, but without music. The headphones did not contain the ambient noise.

Music promotes brain activity

When they were discharged from the hospital or when the originally calculated due date was reached, the scientists examined the children's brains again. They also compared their brain scans with those of children born after a regular gestation period.

It became clear that the premature babies who had not heard any music showed less brain activity in the MRI. On the other hand, there were hardly any differences between the music premature group and those born on time.

Better stimulus processing thanks to music

The so-called salience network in particular benefited from the musical stimulation. It registers sensory impressions and forwards the stimuli to different brain regions for processing. In the intensive care unit, the premature babies are flooded with stimuli. The newborns cannot assign them and are overwhelmed with processing. "By changing the children's environment through music, we were able to improve the circuitry of the brain," the scientists write.

65,000 premature babies annually

A normal pregnancy lasts 40 weeks. Doctors speak of a premature baby if the child sees the light of day before the 37th week of pregnancy. This applies to around 65,000 newborns in Germany every year.

Premature babies are more susceptible to various diseases, they lag behind in physical development and learn more slowly at school than their peers. It takes up to eight years for the children to catch up.

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