Measurement: Two of 30 babies will one day sing and dance, maybe

Infants are not famous for being skilled consumers or producers of music. This study suggests that that lack of fame is justified for 28 of 30 babies:

“Precursors of Dancing and Singing to Music in Three- to Four-Months-Old Infants,” Shinya Fujii [pictured here], Hama Watanabe, Hiroki Oohashi, Masaya Hirashima, Daichi Nozaki, Gentaro Taga, PLoS ONE, 9(5), 2014, e97680. The authors, at Sunnybrook Research Institute, Toronto, Canada, the University of Tokyo, and the Japan Society for the Promotion of Science, Tokyo, explain:

“Here we report limb movements and vocalizations in three- to four-months-old infants while they listened to music and were in silence…. Intriguingly, however, there were two infants [of the 30 infants we examined] who demonstrated striking increases in the rhythmic movements via kicking or arm-waving around the musical tempo during listening to music. Monte-Carlo statistics with phase-randomized surrogate data revealed that the limb movements of these individuals were significantly synchronized to the musical beat.”

Here’s detail from the study:

This is one of the two songs used in the study: