Humanity's Lullaby

When the bow breaks that Greta let hey down, We'll come baby great And oh do you find that this is too jazzy for a go to sleep song? Yes, but I feel like it negates the weirdness of that song. That's it. Yeah, it's not like, how is this in any way comforting? Like there's a baby. It's tied up in a tree there. It's just precariously hung there so that when the wind comes, that just topples over and

the baby just falls to the forest floor. Yeah. You know, I started thinking about this when you when you brought this up earlier, I was sinking back to my own childhood. And there are two songs that my mom would would pretty much use as the default lullabies. One path Magic Dragon, which is also said, which also does have this at

tenage of sadness, but not you know, morbid sadness. It's just about, Hey, you're gonna get older and then you're gonna you know, some of your dreams are gonna die, and you're going to die, and you're gonna eventually gonna die. The Magic Dragon will live on and look for another child to replace you. Well, I mean I wouldn't go that dark on it, but essentially yes. But then the other one was all the Pretty Little Horses, which at first I was like, oh, there's nothing wrong with that

one at all. It's just about when you you know, wake, you're gonna have all the pretty little horses. But then I actually looked at the lullaby up and there's this, like the second verse that my mom didn't sing. It's talking about how there's a poor little lamby and with bees and butterflies pecking out its eyes until the poor lamby cries cries for mama. Well, I think what makes that worse is that your last name is Lamb, So she's probably like, well, my kids, thinking that he's going

to get his eyes pecked out him specifically. Um. But you also know when Cormick McCarthy makes the title of a lullaby his his book title, that is probably not serene terrain. Yeah, there's probably yeah, there you go, because he's not going to write about something unless there's a little death or a lot of death woven into the tapestry of the subject matter. And that's what we see with lullabyes. We see we see a lot of darkness in the lullaby as well as a lot of comfort.

And and that's one of the reasons it makes for such a delightful podcast topic because it's not this the straightforward, cutout thing, no, yeah, because it really yeah. There there are a lot of different layers to this, and one

is again that universality of it. There are lullabies all over the world in according to Zoe Palmer, who is a musician working on a lullabies project at Royal Landon Hospital, she says that wherever you go in the world, women use the same tones, the same sort of way of singing to their babies and she's seen this in the project over and over again. UM, and lullabies are usually in triple meter or six eight time, which kind of gives them that character characteristic rocking feeling to them or

that motion. Yeah, that rock a vibe and back and forth, slow soothing tones. Yeah. Yeah. Again, that's kind of interesting to see that in so many different cultures around the world. Now, the more abidity thing is also a universal and we see both of those in the the fact that you can look back to two thousand years b c. To ancient Babylon and you find evidence of lullabies used then, and it's a menacing lullaby in which a baby is chastised for just serving the house um, the house god

with its crying. So the idea is is, look, it's really it's time for you to go to sleep, because if you do not stop crying, you will wake a demon and it will eat you. I love it and I love that it's inscribed on clay tablets. It's like one of the first lullabies, and it's this is I found this to be a suitable you know, it's it's a it's it's suitable insight into the parenting mind. You know, when you're reaching that point with a child where we're like, I love you, you need to get some sleep. I

need to get some sleep. If you do not get some sleep, demons are going to come for all of us. Well, I think it explains the popularity of the adult book and I'm gonna have to get bleeped out here called Go to Sleep? Oh yes, which is this book for parents that kind of it ends in this refrain every page like saying, you know, saying like okay, like goodbye Moon, good night. Yeah. It's in a way, it's kind of a take on the whole good Night Moon book, Yeah,

which I've I've read a thousand times. And I didn't get the Go that Go the f to Sleep books so much before I had a child, because before I was like, that seems a little harsh, you know, even in you know, I know it's a joke, and I know it's for the adults, enough for the kids, but I was like, I don't know about that. That seems it seems a bit much. But but then I had a child who we brought back to the country with a completely reversed sleep cycle, and I totally got it.

At four am, You're like, ah, that book is brilliant. I got it um all right. So if you look at a lullaby something by the Lua people in western Kenya. It starts with rock rock like rock a by baby, but then it's it ends with the baby who cries will be eaten by a hyena, which is an actual possibility in the part of the world. Yeah, and certainly if you if you go back through time and think of our primordial ancestors, the baby is crying because it's

the crying response is supposed to get human attention. Uh. And arguably UH is also there so that if the child dies too early, you're not going to be as upset about it. I've seen that theory proposed as well. But it could conceivably uh clue in animal predators other human adversaries to your whereabouts. I was thinking about that too. That would be a tell tell science. So it's like hush, hush man that hyena is going to come and get us.

And then it made me think about when when kids get older and they start playing hide and seek, and maybe this is a way of teaching children how to become quiet when they when they can understand this game of trying to escape a predator. Yeah, I feel like sometimes that's the only time my son is quiet is he's he's running off to hide somewhere, or Niver says, you know, hide behind the door or whatnot. Yeah, it's

a kind of interesting little hangover there of that. But so it turns out though that not all lullabys are completely morbid. And Zoe Palmer, again from the Lullaby Project, has said that some of them are telling you the history of a country or telling you how you should or shouldn't run your life, and she says it's kind of like advice columns for babies. Yeah, I mean, in

a sense, you are, you're talking to this child. You're talking at this child, and on some level you want to, you know, you want to already start imparting important information to them. I mean, on a very basic level, you're you're you're dealing at them with it, with language and the very basics of human communication. But already you're projecting all these additional wants and needs and expectations on this child that they should be familiar with their their their

country's heritage, they should be familiar with you know, expected morality, etcetera. Yeah, and that just reminds me too that we do teach a lot of things with song, right our a b c's are learned this song. And we've talked about this before, the power of song to instill a really strong memory in the brain. So it would make sense that this is the way that kids are getting information about hyenas

and such. Yeah, I mean, in addition to the songs, I feel like so much of the language we end up using with with with with young children were choosing everything is kind of sing song. You know, like the first time you point out an elephant, you don't go take if that's an elephant, you elephant, you know, you make You're making the word into a song. And that makes sense, as we discussed in our our our episodes dealing with the with with the power of music and

how music works with the mind. That's that's part and partial to how we acquire language. Yeah, And so it's not so crazy when you think about this idea that lullabys have a kind of power beyond developing cognition in

children or cognitive skills. There's a two thousand and thirteen study published in the Psychology of Music Journal that showed that lullabys have really beneficial effects on the body and the music study involved thirty seven pediatric patients at the Great Ormond Street Hospital in London, and those patients had

cardiac or respiratory problems. Now, the patients were between the ages of seven days and four years old, and each child was involved in three ten minutes sessions involving lullaby singing or story reading or control session with just no interaction. Then their physiological responses and perceived pain levels were measured

before and after each session. So I wanted to cover just the mechanism by which they were measured, because it's probably a big question mark, especially with a seven day old, like how do you measure pain? So their heart rates and oxygen levels were measured with non invasive device called a pulse oxometer, and then their pain level was measured on the Children Hospitals of East Ontario Pain Scale, which is this really trusted behavioral scale used to assess pain

and young children. So the chiop scale includes six categories crying, facial child, verbal, torso, touching legs and scoring ranges from four to no pain to thirteen, which is the worst pain. Alright, So we got all that out of the way, so now we know how have they did this. What they found is that the children's average heart rate had reduced from a hundred thirty four point one two hundred eight point seven, and their pain rating had fallen from six

point two one to five point six four. So here's the thing. It was just the lullaby sessions that have this effect, not the storytelling and not the control. Okay, So there's something to them, not just to the interaction, but to the musical uh interaction that's going on here. It's also crazy when you when you think about the fact that an infant can recognize a lullaby heard in

the womb several months after birth. So the child is in the wound in utero listening to music, but hearing the lullaby that the mom is singing it, and then months and months later it can it can recognize Twinkle Twinkle Little Star. Uh. This was actually a proven out in a study of the University of Helsinki twenty four

women during the final trimester of their pregnancies. Half the women UH were played the melody Twinkle Twinkle Little Star to their fetuses five days a week for the final stages of their pregnancy, and the bins of the babies who heard the melody in utero reacted more strongly to the familiar melody, both immediately and four months after the birth would when compared to the control group that didn't

hear the music. So the take home here, the larger take home outside of aid byes, is that fetuses can recognize and remember sounds from the outside world. But but already we're seeing the soothing power of music even before it has has exited the wound. And I think that's an important point because people don't typically think of the auditory qualities of the womb or or fetus is absorbing that.

But imagine if you were closed inside this this you know, nice fluid filled room, almost like the soaking um I was say, soaking tobes, but they're not that the sensory deprivation chambers, right, and you had nothing but sound to orient yourself too, then you probably would have this really strong relationship with those sounds around you and the sounds outside.

This also brings my mind back to our podcast episode on underwater sound and underwater music, which is is not a huge area of music listening, but you do see people who get really into listening music to music underwater because that the way that the sound ways carrying the water, how it interacts with the skull. UH is supposedly a very unique way to take in the sound. I'm sure that it's got to be a very soothing way as well, unless it's just like total headbanger stuff, but even that

in a muffled way might be kind of nice. Yeah, like these sort of the the the ambient noise of the one might experience in the womb. UM. And of course you more often encounter this with the individuals who are saying throwing a bunch of Mozart at their they're they're still womb in prison child, or or some other type of music, thinking they're going to have some sort of profound impact on the child to make the child smarter or or more inclined to like blue grass upon

exiting the womb. And speaking of exiting the womb, UH, we've talked about this before the fact that humans just eate for just three trimesters, which is pretty short in the mammal world, and so some people have theorized that once the baby is born, those first three months are more like the fourth trimester, and therefore UH babies need to be comforted in a way that is more womb

like with the sounds and with the swaddling. Yeah, I've read that this is uh due in part to our bipedal nature, because when we made the shift from a quadruped to to a biped uh, suddenly we're walking on two legs. It changes the way that our pelvis is shape, which narrows the the exit route, the escape route for that for that baby. So the baby has to come out earlier, when it's smaller, and therefore, to a certain extent,

all human babies are premature. So now consider true premature babies and you really get that sense of how important it is to have that sort of womb like exterior uh refuge for the child. And if you look at lullabys and you look at premies, you can see some really astounding information. There was a study published online and Pediatrics in two thousand and thirteen. It detailed two hundred and seventy two babies and eleven eleven different nick us

around the country. And nick you is just an acronym for basically neonatal clinic for newborns. And the babies were born at at least thirty two weeks in gestation, and they were all pretty small for their gestational age, and they had different health issues, as premies often do now.

Three times a week for two weeks, music therapists would play two tone heartbeat, womb sounds and other woosh audio cues which were synchronized with the baby's vital signs and it was monitored by their breathing rate, their eye movements, and other monitors. So think about this. This is an intentional sort of gestational sounds that are synchronized with our bodies. Now.

Parents and therapists were also asked to sing a preferred lullaby called Songs of Kin, which I'm not familiar with, or Twinkle Twinkle Little Star if they didn't have a selected song remo Ocean disk and this is the type of music device was associated with the best blood oxygen levels and quiet alert states in the premise and sucking behavior, which is super important in premise because they don't they're not quite there yet so that they can accept milk

from the mother or or even breastfeed. So the second thing is really important developmentally in in premies, and that was best with something called the Gotto box, which is again another kind of music device. Now, singing was shown to increase alert times the best and babies of parents who chose their own song had better feeding behaviors and

they consumed more calories compared to the twinkle babies. So this it doesn't say this in the study, but perhaps this ties back to this idea that um, those children became familiar with those tunes in the womb. M hmm, yeah, because those are personal to the parents, to their experience. It also makes it sound like Twinkle Twinkle Little Star is no parents favorite lullaby and yet kids love it. Yeah. Well, they love it because it's, uh, it's easy to sing.

It's it's kind of like it's e bitsy spider. Kids love it's epitsy spider, but it's it really doesn't offer much to the adult. I think it's because they couldn't coordinate their hands to it the spider going up the spout, And the same thing with Twinkle Twinkle Little Star, because they use their hands to flash up the sign of flashing stars. I suppose. All right, we're gonna take a quick break, and when we get back, we're going to

talk about the effect of lullabies on adults. All right, we are back, and we're going to talk about adult pregnant women, Yes, and them listening to lullaby, Yes, exactly. Um. It turns out music therapy can reduce psychological stress among pregnant women as well. UH. And this makes sense because pregnancy is a very stressful time. It's also a long a period of long term um periods of stress, anxiety, hope, fears, everything you can pretty much feel as a human, you're

gonna feel stream changes as well. And so we we have an interesting study here. This was from the College of Nursing at cal Sturing Medical University in Taiwan. They randomly assigned a hundred and sixteen pregnant women to a music group and one and twenty two a control group. So it's, you know, pretty obvious what's going to happen here. The people in the in the music group, they're listening

to music. They're listening to h a lullaby CD that include songs like Brahms, Lullaby, Uh, Twinkle Twink a Little Star, as well as stuff like a little Beethoven, a Little Debu se as a little bit of classical go to sleep music. And they in fact found that the music group showed significant reductions in stress, anxiety, and depression after just two weeks. UH and They used three different established

measurement scales on this particular study. Yeah, the scales are important just and we won't go way deep into this, but just so you know how they kind of weeded this information out. They used the Perceived Stress scale, and they also used the State Traite Anxiety Inventory, and then a third scale which was called the Edinburgh Postnatal Depression Scale.

So they took those three different scales and they tested them before and after, and what they found is that there were significant drops in um in their scores when they were listening to music that particularly like the lullaby

music and the nature sounds and crystals tinkling in the background. Yeah, that's important to know too, that it wasn't just classical music and traditional nursery uh songs, but also these sort of soothing nature sounds, sort of ambient music, and the control group just they had very tiny, minuscule drops that just weren't really significant. So of course this would bear out this idea that the actual music therapy they're just going to listen to this would actually decrease any thoughts

of depression or anxiety, which is really important. I also wanted to point out that these thirty minute music CDs had music that kind of mimic the human heart rate, and we're talking about between sixty and eighty beats per minute, which I think is the key to a lot of this. Yeah, I mean, it's sort of getting me back to the

relaxed level of of human operations, right. Yeah, it's kind of like I was thinking about this, it's placing the pregnant woman inside the memory of the womb of her mother in which they were sixty two eighty beats per minute. Because if again, like put yourself in the place of the fetus, if you're in there, what are you gonna hear? What's going to be that strong signal coming through? If

the human heartbeat? So that I think is the key to that kind of music becoming a soothing, sort of oceanic quiescence that that our minds can kind of just float on, and that takes us this idea of electronic music is perhaps having the ability to embody this and one of the best ways that different types of music can. Yeah, I mean that the second that you mentioned the heartbeat sound, I started thinking of various pieces of music that I've heard that that echo that kind of heartbeat. Uh. In

one way shape or another. And also that sort of that that floaty feeling, that liquid e feeling that and and and sort of the muffled ambient noise outside of the womb. I mean you do hear that a lot in uh, in ambient music, and in music that has a sort of ambient DNA. Now this is from pop

Matters is the website. In the article, it's called the Science of Sleep The Electronic Lullaby by Timothy Brill, and he writes the womb is a regular fallback cliche for the music writer, particularly one fumbling for a description of murky psychedelic sonics. Floating there, comfortably perched in a vat of amniotic fluid. The fetus's ear, not yet fully developed, is encased with liquids, surrounded by a protective layer of vernex, muffling the roughly eight and ninety decibel chronic din of

blood pumping through the mother's arteries. When he goes on to say that newborns, it would seem to him, are predisposed to noise music, specifically that of a fuzzy, warm and liquid timber. That liquiditydia that you just talked about, which is also a reason why you you see all these these white noise create generators, right for for young children generally a more static ambient environment for them to

sleep in. But it's still in a sense ambient noise music nonetheless, and he says that this plays perfectly into this kind of womb soundscaping, because he says that it's a perfect nue for that wound simulation. He says, ambient in experimental electronic music regularly incorporates sounds like running water, hums, drones, buzzes, noise, tibetan throat singing, and other low frequency towns, all of which value electro acoustic space is similar in rhythm and

overtone to the prenatal environment. Yeah, and I mean it's great for us adults too. I mean it works. But all um, I subscribe to the Hearts of Space podcast. It's not really a podcast on radio show however you want to look at it, but music from Hearts of Space. And I think a lot of NPR listeners are canna be familiar with that Bay Area artist. All of it ambient in nature, ranging from sort of ambient classical music to like space guitars to to you know, electronic German

space music. Etcetera. And I'll almost always put a little of that on in the evening to sort of drift off into a peaceful sweep. Do you listen to it during your research as well? It depends on their research. Uh, sometimes times I go to a very ambient I always I'm almost always playing music quan researching. And if it's something that's requires a little more thought or as maybe a little spacey in and of itself, and it maybe

it was something more ambient spacey. But if it's something just like if I'm just you know, cutting some images for the website and stuff that doesn't requires much brain power, then I'm more inclined to listen to something that is more more noisy and more um more high energy. Now this isn't to say that all electronic music is evocative of a gestational sound environment, only that it really lends itself well to this. And um Gabriel had given an

example Brian Eno. He said Brian ENO's original idea of ambient music as quote wallpaper and Eric Citise referral of his proto ambient pieces as furniture music another quote indicate a tendency in the sound itself to provide a means for shelter for the listener. That's interesting, shelter for the listener to produce a home using oral space. It's not for nothing that you Know's own discreet music was allegedly administered in hospitals as a maternal aid to facilitate labor.

It's comforting tones, providing assistance for breathing exercises during the stressful period leading up to delivery. Its sound as security. Yeah, Brian Eno, I think is a tremendous example of this

sort of thing. As like one example of the specifically becomes to mind would be music for airports, which of course he wrote with the the idea here being this is the kind of music you could play in an airport, a place of stress and uh and transition and make it a little more peaceful for the humans that are having to navigate it. And it is a very soothing uh drift e piece. And you find that in a

lot of a lot of ENO's music. Um, for my own part, I also see a little bit of that in the works of Steve rich Terry Riley, H. Peter Gabriel's Last Tempation of Christ soundtrack, Cigareto's Boards of Canada. Some of a f X twins more ambient to works and Mark van Hone. So the question Gabriel brings up and I thought was really interesting, is that is noise music or noisy music just a regression or infantilization And

it's you know, it's fair. It's like, are we going towards electronic music in these instances because we are needing that comfort. I mean, he throws me off a little bit when he uses the word infantilization because you don't want to feel like a big baby with past fires. Yeah exactly. But at the end of the day, that's a very comforting place to be with your music too. I mean music, I think, you know, music should challenge

you at times, music should revue up at times. But there's nothing like a piece of music that returns you to the womb or puts you in a very uh, you know, drift e spacey womb like environment. Should we listen to a little sample of what this might sound like. Yeah, yeah, here's an example that I think fit's pretty perfectly with what we're talking about here. This is Horizon Glow by Australian artist Option Command and Off. The two thousand and

eleven Horizon glow EP released on King Deluxe Records. You can find out more about about King Deluxe and this is a particular artist at King Deluxe dot c A. So let's listen to this track and uh and see where it takes us. What I like about that particular track and when I when I think it's a good example, is that there is this drifting nous to it, this uh,

this ambient, disembodied feeling. But there is also a little bit of noise, a little bit of glitchiness that that's lost in there, which you can easily imagine as being the the muffled chaos of the outside world. I was just thinking, even the tidal horizon, Clow has this idea of looking at this light from beyond that just sort of seems infinite and sort of you know, receding and melting outward and yeah, kind of motion to it. Well, there you have it. Lullabies the science of lullabyes, a

little bit of the culture of lullabyes. This uh, the song that the mother sings to the child born or unborn that is at once soothing, it is also full of ideas, some positive ideas about what parenting is and what what having a child is as well as a way to perhaps event some of the the more negative and realistic ideas about what it means to bring this fragile creature into the world. Indeed, I like that idea

of advice columns for babies. Yeah, if you guys have any thoughts on lullabies, and we certainly want to hear them, Yes, you can reach us in all the usual places. Stuff to Blow your Mind dot com is the mothership. That's where you'll find all the podcast episodes, all the videos, the blog post, et cetera. You can find us on Tumbler, on Facebook, on Twitter, on YouTube where we are mind

Stuff Show. And Uh, I'm reminded now that a number of listeners have written in over the years and mentioned that they listened to this podcast as in the evening as they're drifting off to sleep. So in a sense we are a lullaby uh, full of inspiring and cautionary information and and perhaps our voices are soothing as well

device columns for your subconscious. Yeah, so it's probably fitting that that as we spiral everything out here, we should also close with a little bit of that Uh that that track horizon Glow by option command and Julie is there means that the the waking listener can get in touch with this. Indeed, in fact, it just occurred to me that if you have a strong idea about a lullaby, one that you really like or one that you think is just terrible or just so dark, that you want

to share it with us, let us know. You can email us at Blue of Mind at how stuff works dot com. For more on this and thousands of other topics, visit how stuff works dot com. M HM