July 17, 2014 • 29 mins
Lullabies are soothing, grotesque and universal. In this episode of Stuff to Blow Your Mind, Robert and Julie explore the surprisingly rich world of human sleep songs.
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Speaker 1 (00:03):
Welcome to Stuff to Blow your Mind from how Stuff
Works dot com. Hey, you're welcome to Stuff to Blow
your Mind. My name is Robert Lamb and I'm Julie Douglas. Julie,
what's your go to lallaby? You still do lallaby? Yeah?
And I do it in this kind of like jazzy
(00:23):
way because I can't stand this lallaby. But it has
been introduced to my daughter Rugby baby in the tree
jobs and when the wind blows that grata will rock.
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,
(00:45):
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,
(01:07):
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
(01:28):
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,
(01:49):
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
(02:10):
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
(02:32):
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
(02:53):
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
(03:15):
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,
(03:36):
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
(03:57):
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,
(04:19):
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
(04:40):
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
(05:00):
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
(05:21):
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
(05:44):
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.
(06:07):
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
(06:30):
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
(06:53):
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
(07:16):
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,
(07:36):
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
(07:56):
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
(08:17):
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
(08:38):
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.
(09:02):
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
(09:23):
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
(09:43):
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
(10:07):
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
(10:29):
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
(10:50):
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
(11:13):
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.
(11:34):
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
(11:56):
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,
(12:16):
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
(12:37):
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,
(13:01):
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
(13:23):
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,
(13:46):
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
(14:07):
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
(14:28):
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
(14:48):
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,
(15:09):
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
(15:31):
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
(15:53):
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
(16:14):
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
(16:35):
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,
(16:56):
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,
(17:19):
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.
(17:41):
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
(18:04):
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
(18:26):
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,
(18:49):
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
(19:11):
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,
(19:31):
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.
(19:53):
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
(20:18):
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
(20:40):
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
(21:01):
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
(21:22):
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
(21:42):
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
(22:03):
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.
(22:30):
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
(22:51):
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
(23:12):
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
(23:34):
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
(23:55):
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,
(24:19):
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
(24:41):
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
(25:04):
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.
(25:26):
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
(25:47):
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
(26:08):
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
(26:38):
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
(27:01):
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
(27:24):
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
(27:45):
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
(28:06):
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
(28:28):
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,
(28:51):
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
Welcome to Stuff to Blow your Mind from how Stuff
Works dot com. Hey, you're welcome to Stuff to Blow
your Mind. My name is Robert Lamb and I'm Julie Douglas. Julie,
what's your go to lallaby? You still do lallaby? Yeah?
And I do it in this kind of like jazzy
(00:23):
way because I can't stand this lallaby. But it has
been introduced to my daughter Rugby baby in the tree
jobs and when the wind blows that grata will rock.
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,
(00:45):
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,
(01:07):
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
(01:28):
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,
(01:49):
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
(02:10):
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
(02:32):
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
(02:53):
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
(03:15):
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,
(03:36):
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
(03:57):
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,
(04:19):
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
(04:40):
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
(05:00):
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
(05:21):
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
(05:44):
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.
(06:07):
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
(06:30):
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
(06:53):
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
(07:16):
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,
(07:36):
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
(07:56):
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
(08:17):
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
(08:38):
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.
(09:02):
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
(09:23):
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
(09:43):
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
(10:07):
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
(10:29):
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
(10:50):
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
(11:13):
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.
(11:34):
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
(11:56):
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,
(12:16):
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
(12:37):
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,
(13:01):
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
(13:23):
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,
(13:46):
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
(14:07):
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
(14:28):
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
(14:48):
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,
(15:09):
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
(15:31):
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
(15:53):
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
(16:14):
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
(16:35):
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,
(16:56):
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,
(17:19):
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.
(17:41):
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
(18:04):
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
(18:26):
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,
(18:49):
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
(19:11):
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,
(19:31):
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.
(19:53):
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
(20:18):
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
(20:40):
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
(21:01):
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
(21:22):
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
(21:42):
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
(22:03):
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.
(22:30):
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
(22:51):
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
(23:12):
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
(23:34):
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
(23:55):
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,
(24:19):
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
(24:41):
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
(25:04):
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.
(25:26):
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
(25:47):
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
(26:08):
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
(26:38):
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
(27:01):
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
(27:24):
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
(27:45):
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
(28:06):
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
(28:28):
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,
(28:51):
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
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