Summary: New research offers early evidence of how the infant brain gradually converts music into spontaneous movement. The study combined electroencephalogram (EEG) recordings with automated video motion-tracking to measure neural responses and body movements in infants listening to music.
Results show that while infants can process structured music from as early as three months, the spontaneous inclination to move more when hearing music appears mainly toward the end of the first year.
Key Facts
- The Dual Auditory–Motor Measure: This study fills a major gap by simultaneously measuring infant brain activity and spontaneous movement in response to music, providing a direct window into how perception and action develop together.
- The Music Manipulations: Researchers presented three audio formats: intact instrumental refrains of children’s songs (“music”), versions with the temporal structure scrambled (“shuffled music”), and pitch-shifted variants (high and low pitch). Shuffled music disrupted predictable rhythmic and melodic structures to test sensitivity to musical organization.
- Early Sensory Encoding: EEG analyses showed stronger event-related potentials (ERPs) and auditory steady-state responses (ASSRs) to real music than to shuffled music in infants aged 3, 6, and 12 months. This indicates the auditory system is tuned to musical structure very early in life.
- Movement Emerges Later: Behavior diverged from neural sensitivity: only the 12-month-olds increased their spontaneous movements in response to structured music versus shuffled music. Three- and six-month-olds did not show significant movement differences between audio types.
- The 10 Principal Movements of Infancy: Using markerless pose estimation (DeepLabCut) and principal component analysis (PCA), researchers distilled infant gestures into ten principal movement types:
- Front-back rocking
- Side sway
- Proto-clapping
- Leg-kicking
- Up-down rocking
- Arm-pedalling
- Feet-kicking
- Whole-body wiggling
- Feet-shuffling
- Feet-pedalling
- Upper-Body Bias at 12 Months: The movement increase among 12-month-olds was concentrated in upper-body and arm-related gestures—front-back rocking, side sway, proto-clapping, up-down rocking, and arm-pedalling—while lower-body movement levels stayed similar across conditions and ages.
- Development of the Dorsal Stream: The authors link the behavioral shift to maturation of the dorsal auditory pathway, a neural route implicated in connecting auditory perception to motor planning and rhythmic entrainment.
- No Evidence of Beat Synchronization: Across all age groups, infants did not synchronize movements to the music’s beat. The data suggest a two-stage trajectory: early auditory encoding and basic motor activation, followed later by refined timing and coordinated entrainment.
Source: eLife
Researchers find that music begins to shape movement within the first postnatal year.
Published originally as a Reviewed Preprint and now appearing as the Version of Record in eLife, this study sheds light on how the developing brain transforms musical input into spontaneous motor responses. The evidence suggests auditory recognition of musical structure is present early, but an observable motor response to structured music increases only toward the end of the first year, while the ability to move in time with the beat matures even later.
Musicality—our capacity to perceive, appreciate, and produce music—is increasingly seen as a core human trait. It involves two interlinked components: sensory processing (recognizing musical patterns) and motor engagement (moving in response to rhythm). Yet how and when these two components connect during infancy has remained unclear.
“Few studies have tracked infants’ brain signals and spontaneous movement to music at the same time,” says lead author Trinh Nguyen, Affiliated Researcher in the Neuroscience of Perception and Action Lab at the Istituto Italiano di Tecnologia and Senior Research Fellow at the University of Vienna. “Measuring both sensory and motor responses together improves our understanding of how musical perception becomes movement.”
The study tested 79 infants at 3, 6, and 12 months. While listening to intact refrains, shuffled versions, and pitch-shifted variants, infants underwent EEG recording and were filmed for automated motion analysis. Neural measures focused on ERPs to individual tones and ASSRs to continuous sound, revealing enhanced responses to intact musical structure at all ages.
Movement analysis used an open-source markerless pose-tracking tool to capture body kinematics. Applying PCA to the tracked coordinates produced the ten principal movement classes listed above. Statistical modeling showed a significant interaction between music type and age: only the 12-month group moved more when hearing structured music versus shuffled music.
Further inspection showed that this increase centered on upper-body gestures and limb activity, while lower-body movement did not vary with music condition. The research team also found no sign of movement timed to the musical beat in any age group, implying that entrainment or beat-synchronized movement requires later developmental refinement.
Nguyen and colleagues propose that these findings reflect the gradual maturation of neural pathways—particularly the dorsal auditory stream—that link auditory patterns to motor output. As infants develop, this circuitry appears to support progressively complex motor responses to music.
“Our results show that moving to music begins to appear early in development, though coordinated, beat-driven movement remains underdeveloped before 12 months,” concludes senior author Giacomo Novembre, Principal Investigator at the Neuroscience of Perception and Action Lab. “Future studies should extend these observations beyond the first year and investigate the functional role of music-driven movement in early social and cognitive development.”
Key Questions Answered:
A: Although the infant auditory cortex can detect and respond to musical structure within the first months, the neural pathway that connects auditory perception to purposeful movement—the dorsal auditory stream—develops more slowly. This means infants lack the coordinated motor control and neural connectivity required to translate musical perception into beat-synchronized movement until later in infancy.
A: The team employed an open-source AI-based markerless motion-tracking tool to extract body keypoints from video recordings without manual labeling. They then applied Principal Component Analysis to the tracked data, reducing complex motion into ten principal movement categories. This automated approach provided an objective, quantitative view of how infants move in response to different musical stimuli.
A: Not necessarily. The study found that 12-month-olds increased upper-body movements when hearing structured music but did not demonstrate synchronization with the beat. In other words, infants begin to show music-driven motor responses around one year, but precise timing and entrainment to rhythm appear later in development.
Editorial Notes:
- This article was edited by a Neuroscience News editor.
- The original journal paper was reviewed in full.
- Additional context was provided by the editorial staff.
About this music and neurodevelopment research news
Author: Emily Packer
Source: eLife
Contact: Emily Packer – eLife
Image: The image is credited to Neuroscience News
Original Research: Open access. “Development of auditory and spontaneous movement responses to music over the first postnatal year” by Atesh Koul, Félix Bigand, Gabriela Markova, Giacomo Novembre, Roberta Bianco, Susanne Reisner, Stefanie Hoehl, Trinh Nguyen. eLife. DOI: 10.7554/eLife.107088.4
Abstract
Development of auditory and spontaneous movement responses to music over the first postnatal year
Humans across cultures recognize and often move to music, but the developmental timeline for when infants begin to move in response to music is not well established. This study records neural activity (EEG) and body kinematics (markerless pose estimation) from 79 infants at 3, 6, and 12 months while they listened to children’s song refrains, shuffled versions, and pitch-shifted variants. Neural data show enhanced auditory responses to intact music compared with shuffled music across ages, indicating early encoding of musical structure. Movement data reveal that more complex, structured movement patterns in response to music appear by 12 months, though no age group showed coordinated, beat-synchronized movement. Differences in responses to high versus low pitch varied by age. These results provide initial insight into how the developing brain converts musical input into progressively sophisticated spontaneous movements.