Birth of the Beat: The Vital Musical Dimension of Mother-Infant Interaction ANS

This one is short.  It's about how new mothers and infants interact in a musical way that ends up being a precursor to social interaction and taking turns.  I think.  
Find it here:  http://www.nonesoblind.org/blog/?p=9560&cpage=1#comment-466645  
--Kim


Reported by the New York Times

Birth of the Beat: The Vital Musical Dimension of Mother-Infant Interaction

The following are passages from a longer article –which can be found in its entirety at http://www.sciencenews.org/view/feature/id/61561/title/Birth__of_the_beat– from Science News, in an issue in which the scientific study of the role of music in human nature is reported.

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Birth of the beat
Music's roots may lie in melodic exchanges between mothers and babies

by Bruce Bower
Science News, August 12, 2010

[Stephen Malloch, a musicologist at the University of Western Sydney in Australia] probed mom-baby conversations by measuring sound waves, pitch patterns and timbre, or tone attributes, starting with those in Trevarthen's video. An acoustic analysis revealed three features of communicative musicality ­ pulse, quality and narrative.

Pulse refers to a timed series of sounds and words in an interaction. Each utterance by mother and daughter lasted about one and a half seconds, with little variation. Quality consists of emotional signals conveyed by voice and gestures. One example is the swoop of a mother's hand accompanying a dropping, then rising vocal pitch. In the recorded encounter, mother and daughter used the pulse and quality of the interaction to create musical narratives lasting no more than about 30 seconds.

One narrative begins with the mother uttering low-pitched phrases, such as "come on" and "that's clever," for five seconds. Her daughter's voice rises in response and the mother moves her vocal pitch an octave higher. Mom prompts responses from baby for about eight seconds. Their voices rise to a peak of intensity during a back-and-forth exchange that lasts another seven seconds. Mother and daughter then take six seconds to return to the mother's original, low voice pitch. So, Malloch says, each collaborative story contained an introduction, development, climax and resolution.
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In an upcoming issue of Infant and Child Development, Trevarthen marshals evidence suggesting that even newborns purposely coordinate vocalizations and movements with those of caretakers. An innate impulse to forge emotional ties with others drives such behavior, he posits. In the months after birth, babies build on this impulse by adopting a native culture's style of emoting vowel sounds.
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Psychologist Maya Gratier of Université Paris X–Nanterre and psychiatrist Gisèle Apter-Danon of Université Paris Diderot have examined communication breakdowns that afflict babies born to mothers diagnosed with borderline personality disorder. This condition revolves around a tendency to form intense, unstable relationships.

People with borderline personalities act impulsively, feel emotionally empty and constantly fear abandonment. Many have survived severe child abuse and neglect.

Gratier and Apter-Danon codirect a project that has tracked the interactions of about 150 pairs of French mothers and their babies from birth to about age 5. Many mothers qualify as having borderline personality disorder. Others have obsessive-compulsive personality disorder, paranoid personality disorder or no mental ailments.

In brief laboratory exchanges, these mothers awkwardly repeat one phrase over and over or produce strings of unusual sounds, such as tongue clicking and whistling. No rhythmic flow characteristic of typical baby talk emerges. It's almost as if a baby isn't there at all.

That leaves infants unable to get a sound in edgewise. They withdraw from mothers with borderline personalities, vocalize little or get fussy and upset.
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Depressed mothers offer a more varied verbal diet to their babies than borderline mothers, but in an unusually low, unexpressive voice devoid of rhythmic timing, according to studies directed by psychologist Lynne Murray of the University of Reading in England. Infants interact hesitantly with depressed mothers, mimicking their low, flat vocal delivery.

Borderline personality disorder and depression alike deprive women of the flexibility and expressiveness needed for communicating musically with babies, Gratier holds. When there's no room for playful musical exchanges, interactive sync is sunk. In their long-term study, Gratier and Apter-Danon find that disrupted musical communication between mothers and babies heralds social difficulties for these children in preschool.
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Scientists already knew, she notes, that 4-month-olds who coordinate pauses, turn taking and other conversational rhythms with mothers ­ without becoming rigidly synchronized and unable to adjust ­ interact well with others at age 1 (SN: 6/23/01, p. 390). That's consistent with the idea that mothers and babies employ just enough musical structure in their encounters to enable creative storytelling, thus grooming the child to deal flexibly with others.
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