EJN: What has been, in your opinion, your most exciting result or
finding?
TRAINOR: Well, that is hard to answer, I’lI have to give a few! In a
general sense, I think the most exciting and surprising finding is how
important music is across domains, including emotional wellbeing, social
interaction, and language development, as reflected in how musical
people are and how music is used by caregivers around the world in their
earliest interactions with babies. My research is suggesting that a
large part of the power of music has to do with its temporal structure,
in how it is organized over time. This affects essentially every part of
what it is to be human. Everything that we experience in the world
unfolds over time. You can’t stop time! And so, one of the main things
that the brain needs to do is organize incoming information into
meaningful units (e.g., words, melodies, actions) in real time. It’s a
daunting task when you think about it. One of the ways the brain copes
with this is to continually make predictions about what will happen
next, so it can focus future attention optimally, and react when its
predictions are not borne out. The regularity of rhythms enhances the
ability to predict when future sounds are likely to occur. Rhythms are
fundamental to how we move and all of our physiological systems, such as
heart rate and breathing. Even cognition and social interactions are
rhythmically organized. Our thoughts take place over time, and how we
interact with other people takes place over time. And there’s so much
exciting work now on how rhythms mediate interpersonal interactions by
enabling synchronization. For me, the fundamental role of rhythm is
absolutely fascinating.
One of our discoveries that I find the most interesting is that infants
use interpersonal rhythmic synchrony to decide who to trust and
befriend. If adults move in synchrony to music with each other, even for
a short time, afterwards they like each other more, they trust each
other more, and they feel more affiliated. If you give them a game to
play in which they can compete or cooperate, they will cooperate more.
So, movement synchrony between people has a profound effect on social
relations, and the regular beat of music is the perfect stimulus for
inducing movement synchrony between people. And we’ve shown that this
occurs in children as young as 14 months! After being bounced to music
in-sync with a stranger for only three minutes, infants are much more
likely to help that stranger by picking up an object she
“accidentally” dropped that she needed for a task (e.g., a clothespin
to pin clothes on a line), compared to infants who were bounced
out-of-sync with a stranger. To me, this is absolutely fascinating
because not only do infants use musical rhythms to understand music and
language, but they also use them to decide who they should trust, help
and befriend in their social environment. Furthermore, our studies show
that infants’ brain oscillations track the frequency (or tempo) of the
basic beat in musical rhythms, as well as its metrical (grouping)
structure (e.g., what differentiates a waltz from a march). And we’ve
shown that this is present already in infants born two months
prematurely. Thus, rhythm tracking appears to be a fundamental neural
organizing principle, which might explain why deficits in rhythm and
timing are associated with most developmental disorders.