Humans, unlike any other animal, are able to clap, tap a toe and dance rhythmically to a beat. Even our closest evolutionary relatives, such as the chimpanzee do not synchronise their behaviour to rhythmic sounds like we do. Since it is not feasible to observe behavioural reactions in newborns, the researchers who carried out this study used adhesive scalp electrodes to measure electrical brain signals. The babies' brains produced an electrical response indicating that they had expected to hear the downbeat when it had been removed.

The findings have just been been reported in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences*, and what makes them really interesting is that they undermine some previous assumptions such as ‘beat induction' is learned in the first few months of life from a parent through activities such as rocking. This new study demonstrates that beat perception is either innate or learned during pregnancy, as the developing sense of hearing is at least partly functional from around three months prior to birth.

Towards the end of last year scientists in America found that babies of just 5 months old who are too young to speak are able to distinguish the differences between the works of major classical composers.

The findings came from experts from Brigham Young University where they conducted tests on 96 babies aged between three and nine months. They found that babies responded differently to upbeat tunes, such as 'Ode to Joy' from Beethoven's Ninth Symphony, compared to a selection of calmer tunes. By nine months, babies could do the opposite - that is, pick out the sorrowful sound of Beethoven's Seventh Symphony from a series of happy pieces.

To find out whether babies were able to tell the difference between different musical scores, researchers designed experiments that 'take advantage of what babies ‘say with their eyes'.

First they displayed an 'emotionally-neutral' face for the baby while music played.

When the baby looked away from the face, the music stopped and the researchers queued up a new song from a play list of five happy and five sad pieces. For each, observers recorded how long the baby paid attention to the face. The babies that noticed a switch from happy to sad, or vice versa, stared at the face three to four seconds longer than usual because of their heightened interest.

The report said that the babies' ‘discrimination of music is important because music, like speech, is communicative and a basic function of music and speech is to express meaning through emotion.' The results of the musical study were published in the academic journal Infant Behavior and Development.

*Winkler et al. Newborn infants detect the beat in music. Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, Jan 26, 2009; DOI: 10.1073/pnas.0809035106