Who needs Mozart anyway?
We're all born creative (yes, really)
When my daughter was a baby I made up songs about almost everything.
While I can’t remember many of them, one that has stuck is about a rubber whale called Harvey she played with in the bath:
He’s Harvey the Humpbacked Whale
he’s the mammal with the great big tale
to tell of the high seas, the big and the little fishies
he likes to sing
and he thinks he sounds like
‘I’m dreaming of a White Christmas’
You see what I did there. Sing rhymes with Bing, you know the one…
I sang to her constantly, and her father often played the piano with her balanced on his lap. That’s what you get when both parents are musicians.
These were songs about nothing important, which is to say, songs about everything important. They were about the two of us having fun together, the joy of music and singing and seeing her face when I sang to her.
They were the natural consequence of spending so much time together, and the pleasure of creating something for my tiny audience of one.
The Mozart effect
At the same time, the Mozart effect was a hot topic of conversation in the new mother circles I moved in.
The idea was that listening to classical music, and specifically Mozart, could boost intelligence in babies. It came from a 1993 study in which college students who listened to Mozart for ten minutes at a time showed a temporary improvement in spatial reasoning.
Later research suggested the effect was small and short-lived, probably caused by a general lift in mood and alertness rather than Mozart himself.
Everyone likes a bandwagon, and Mozart, a child prodigy himself, made for an irresistible one. And so a generation of babies, both in utero and freshly born, were played Mozart on repeat.
Babies don’t need a head start
The irony is that babies don’t even need a musical head start.
New research suggests that newborns can already anticipate and respond to rhythmic patterns in music.
This is also happening even before birth, with unborn babies responding to sound and movement in the womb, things like the steady pulse of a heartbeat, the rhythm of walking, and the rise and fall of voices.
In other words, our brains enter this world already tuned to music and the natural rhythms that surround us. Here we are, then, trying to engineer creativity and intelligence into our children, when it’s simply part of being human.
Long before we can speak or sing properly, we’re already experimenting with rhythms and the patterns that form them. Anyone who has watched a baby kick, sway, or babble can see that rhythm naturally invites a response.
Sound becomes movement, and that movement nearly always becomes play. And as parents we encourage this every time we sing a song, clap our hands, and hold a baby in our arms while we sway from side to side.
It’s joyful and fun and filled with love.
And it’s also a pure form of creativity that isn’t about producing anything except the next smile or giggle. Pure exploration that might seem to have no purpose at all, but which is crucial to our development.
What happened to adult creativity?
But if babies arrive with the cognitive foundations for music and creativity, why are so many adults convinced they don’t have a musical or creative bone in their bodies?
What happens?
Does this built-in ability, something we are—literally!—born with, gradually disappear along with the delicious baby rolls on our arms and legs? Does it disappear as soon as we say our first word or take our first bite of solid food? Is there just not room in our heads for this and all the other stuff we have to learn?
Or is it simply forgotten?
Buried under the weight of our expectations about talent and ability? Or the terrible and terribly pervasive idea that in order to be able to call yourself creative you must, by default, be able to produce something ‘worthwhile’?
Producing something didn’t matter when we were babies, and it still doesn’t matter now. What does matter, though, is that unless there’s a baby or small child in front of us we’re less likely to play.
We’re too often reluctant to make things up, to let ourselves freely respond to music and rhythms just because we feel like it, or try creating something for no reason other than we want to see what happens.
Creativity roots lie deep
If newborn babies are already responding instinctively to rhythm, then the roots of creativity must lie deeper than any training or talent. And creativity isn’t something we have to acquire because it’s something we already have.
It’s integral to the way the human brain makes sense of the world from day one, before day one, even.
Mozart is wonderful, but he was never the point. Harvey the Humpbacked Whale will do just as well, at any age.
In fact, in our household we still know all the words.