The intriguing evolution of musicality in humans, that primal form of artistic expression across cultures – that elevates in celebration, is an empath in grief, a rally cry in protests, a companion in solitude – remains enigmatic to scientists. This phenomenon has now become the subject of study of a group of psychologists, who have discovered that even a three-month old infant can recognise melody, and then by their first birthday, begin to spontaneously dance to it.
The study, published in eLife, dives into our instinctive engagement of music – perceiving it, appreciating, and producing it. It looks at both the sensory component (that gives us the ability to recognise music) and the motor component (that makes us move to rhythm).
Born to dance
In fact, human babies are born to dance, according to an older 2010 paper in Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences. When scientists played classical music, nursery rhymes, drumbeats, baby talk and regular speech, they found that 120 children between five to 24 months universally got moving with clear rhythm to music, unlike their response to just speech.
“Humans across cultures not only share the ability to recognise music but also respond to it through movement,” says the new paper. While the sensory encoding of music is well-studied, when and how infants “naturally start moving to music is largely unexplored,” the recent paper noted. This study simultaneously investigates infants’ neural (auditory) responses and spontaneous movements to music during the first postnatal year.
How it begins
The brain encodes musical structure very early in life but, only one-year-old children spontaneously moved more to music… “specifically exhibiting rocking, swaying, and clapping-like movements.” Only six-month-olds showed stronger brain responses to high-pitched compared to low-pitched music, while high-pitched music predicted movements at all ages, the paper adds.
“Studying both the sensory and motor components of musicality in infants would give us a better understanding of how we learn to transform the perception of music into movement,” lead author Trinh Nguyen, affiliated researcher in the Neuroscience of Perception and Action Lab at the Istituto Italiano di Tecnologia (Italian Institute of Technology; IIT), Rome, Italy, and senior research fellow at the University of Vienna, Austria, said in a release.
What the study did
The researchers studied 79 children aged three, six and 12 months old, and with the help of electroencephalogram recording (or EEG, a non-invasive, painless test that records the electrical activity of the brain) analysed their neural (auditory) responses and movement measurements.
From the recordings the team could pin the infants’ neural responses to changing tones in music. The study sheds light on how the developing brain gradually transforms music into spontaneous movements.
What the study found
All age groups showed an enhanced auditory response to the predictability of musical structure. As for movement, the research used automated video-based motion-tracking to compare the infants’ spontaneous movements in response to the music types. They looked at front-back rocking, side sway, proto-clapping, leg-kicking, up-down rocking, arm-pedalling, feet-kicking, whole-body wiggling, feet-shuffling, and feet-pedalling.
“Across the first year of life, infants seem to consistently move their lower body while slowly increasing their capacity for more complex upper-body and whole-body movements while seated, as we saw in the 12-month-olds,” Dr. Nguyen explained. “We believe this increasing complexity is linked to the gradual maturation of the dorsal auditory stream [a neural pathway] in the brain, a pathway that has previously been suggested to play a crucial role in rhythmic entrainment and beat perception.”
While robust auditory processing of music is present as early as three months, the translation of these sensory processes into organised motor behaviours unfolds gradually throughout and beyond the first year of life, the paper concludes.
Published – July 16, 2026 02:30 pm IST