EJN: Did you have a particular mentor or role model, on your music
side or your science side, that helped you get to where you are today?
TRAINOR: That’s a good question. I’ve been influenced by many people,
but I’d have to say the main one was my PhD supervisor, Sandra Trehub.
She was really a pioneer. She was first and foremost a developmental
psychologist, and she wasn’t afraid to look at how development took
place in the real world outside the laboratory. What are parents doing
and what are infants responding to? Rather than only figuring out how
does an infant process sound, for example, she wanted to know how
interactions between mothers and infants take place in real social
settings. She was not trained in music, but it became obvious that music
was a really important part of pretty much every infant’s early
environment. Since that time, very broad demographic studies have shown
that across all cultures people sing to infants. It is a part of every
culture that we can find. Sandra was a pioneer for not only noticing
that, but then thinking: If this is so prevalent, it must be important.
So, why are parents engaging in this behavior? Why are infants
responding to music? This creative way of thinking was really
inspirational for me. It might be hard for younger scientists today to
imagine, but 50 years ago, such questions regarding musical behaviour
were not even on the radar for most neuroscientists.