[ExI] The Happy Song

[William Flynn Wallace]

On Tue, Feb 7, 2017 at 10:09 AM, BillK <pharos at gmail.com> wrote:

> Now I'm REALLY Happy!  :)
>

​(from the link)  Most systematic work has found young babies have clear
preferences for consonance over dissonance and can remember the tempo and
timbre
<http://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1111/j.1749-6632.2001.tb05721.x/full>
of music they’ve heard before. Babies prefer the female voice but like it
even more
<http://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0163638306000324> when
it takes on the qualities of “motherese” (the high-energy singsong tone we
all naturally adopt when talking to babies)​

------------------
​An interesting sidelight to this is that babies (and who knows how much
older people have to be before this preference is lost, if ever) do not
like the low voice of Daddy and other men.  I scares them easily.  Makes
sense:  their mother's voice is the one they heard for nine months and
Daddy's voice was much further away.

Now take a look at teen idol singers:  high voices, even falsetto, from
guys.  Few if any basses (since I don't listen to pop I can't say about
today's voices on CD or radio or MTV, whatever).    Low voices that come to
mind:  Johnny Cash​, Tennessee Ernie Ford, not exactly teen idols.  Even
when they have a low voice they sing at the top of their range.

Did you ever hear a villain in a movie with a high voice?  And when war,
conflict of any kind come on the movie screen you hear huge bass
instruments booming out music in a minor key (darker to most ears).

You have to wonder just how much of our musical preference is innate or
possibly due to the sounds fetuses heard in the womb.  More research is to
come,says the article.  I'd play some operatic basses to fetuses and see
what happens!

bill w


> <https://theconversation.com/we-created-a-song-that-makes-
> babies-happy-72309>
>
> Quote:
> After one final round of tweaks from Heap, we went for a different
> kind of test. We assembled about 20 of the babies in one room and
> played them the song all together. If you ever met an excited toddler
> or young baby, you will know that two and a half minutes is a long
> time to hold the attention of even one child, let alone two dozen.
> When The Happy Song played we were met by a sea of entranced little
> faces. This final bit wasn’t the most scientific as tests go but it
> definitely convinced me that we had a hit on our hands.
> ---------------
>
> BillK
>
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