Song in Your Womb

I listened to a music education presentation at the Disney Hall in Los Angeles on Monday, October 29th and was totally blown away when Soili Perkiö, the Head of the Music Education Department at the Sibelius Academy in Helsinki, Finland, played a recording called "Womb Sounds" by Dr. Sheila Woodward from South Africa, who now teaches at the USC's Thornton School of Music.

In 1992, as part of her doctoral thesis, Dr. Woodward placed hydrophones (miniature microphones that work in liquids) inside the wombs of several pregnant women (with their permission, naturally) and recorded the sounds that babies hear inside that watery world.

Guess what those sounds are?

• Mom's heartbeat
  
• Mom's voice
  
• Music that Mom plays

I nearly came out of my seat! It was evident that I hadn't been thinking big enough yet. That recording reinforced EVERYTHING I've been doing with SingBabySing™ plus took my ideas to the prenatal level!

If a baby hears her mom's voice around 4-5 months during development inside the womb, and other research shows that this mommy voice highly impacts the baby's later language development (it does), then how much more important is it that moms everywhere be given the opportunity to learn how to use their voices to their fullest beauty and power so that their babies will get the best possible leg up in life!

Another amazing story that came from that conference was the story of El Sistema, the phenomenal music education program in Venezuela!

But more on that another time.

For now, I simply finish by saying that music and language education start in the womb, not (WOW!) after birth (WOW again!)