Effects of Music on the Unborn Child

Music can be used to influence people’s mood and has been used to attempt to affect the brain of a child in its mother’s womb. Some people think that having an unborn child listen to different types of music will have different effects on how the child will grow. Some people believe that music has no influence while others believe that if they introduce their unborn child to classical music the baby will grow up to be smarter than the kid who either listened to other types of music or no music while in the womb. Studies have been done on how music can affect an unborn, and many different results have come from these studies. Not only can the unborn child actually hear the music, but the child will remember the song even after they are born. Music affects attitudes as well as thoughts. According to the book titled What to Listen for in Music by Aaron Copland, there are four elements of music: rhythm, melody, harmony, and tone color. Each of these elements are not heard by themselves but are heard together as one sound. Each part of music has a special and unique way wherewith we interpret and react to it. Rhythm comes first in the musical elements because many historians say that music started with a beating of a rhythm. Whether it was the cavemen with branches or another group rhythm was the first element of music found (Copland, 33). The second element, melody, is second because rhythm is more of a physical motion and so melody is experienced as a mental emotion. The melody is the most crucial part of the music. It is the only subjective portion of music that the audience rejects or accepts by itself (Copland, 49). Harmony, the third element, is the most sophisticated. The harmony was the most recently discovered and has been greatly appreciated (Copland, 61). The last element, tone color, is the quality of sound produced by a particular musical instrument (Copland, 78). Aaron Copland later goes on to explain the difference of how we listen to music now compared

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