“Sleep child, sleep now, the coconut is coming and it will take you,” says the lyrics of a traditional lullaby. The funny thing is, despite the frightening message, this lullaby succeeds its purpose. That is: that the babies fall asleep quickly and fall into the arms of Morpheus. The key does not lie in the lyrics, but in the music. In fact, a study by Harvard University (USA) published in the scientific journal Current Biology revealed that human beings are capable of distinguishing a song made to dance from a lullaby in any language and coming from any culture in the world; including some quite remote and isolated, such as the lullabies of the Peruvian Quechuas or the Ainus, an indigenous ethnic group settled mainly on the Japanese island of Hokkaido.
But what do children’s lullabies have in common that we are so good at differentiating them is the question posed at Cuckooland, a British children’s furniture company. Neither short nor lazy, they had a team of researchers analyze ten classic children’s lullabies, including the popular Brahms lullaby or Estrellita, where are you? And they came to the conclusion that there was a common formula: they were all around ninety-one beats per minute, usually composed in the key of C, and written in a four-by-four rhythm.
“The function of a lullaby is none other than to calm a baby and help him sleep, so a slow tempo, a simple rhythmic pattern and a simple melody, easy to memorize and sing, with repetitive phrases and verses, was to be expected. ”, Annaliese Grimaud, researcher at the Music & Science Lab of the University of Durham (England) analyzed as a result of the study.
Then it occurred to the Cuckooland researchers that they could go a little further and find out if there were any modern songs that met these canons. Sifting through the Spotify charts, they came to the conclusion that among the ones that best fit the “lullaby formula” are Only human, by Jonas Brothers, Someone you loved, by Lewis Capaldi, and You need to calm down. by Taylor Swift. Even one from Sean Paul and DJ David Guetta, Mad love. Who was going to tell the popular DJ! What left them absolutely stunned is that there was one that had all the characteristics of the ideal lullaby. Namely: One, from the Irish rock band U2. An interesting alternative to the classics to sleep the suckers.
There are lullabies that leave their mark. The lullabies that sing to us as children are unforgettable. What’s more, it seems that they are engraved in our minds from before we are born. This was demonstrated by Finnish researchers from the University of Helsinki. In an experiment with twenty-four pregnant women, they were asked to sing the song Estrellita, where are you? To their fetuses. five days a week during the last trimester of pregnancy. Four months after the delivery, they were reunited. And they found that the babies whose mothers had cradled with this melody while still in the womb recognized it and reacted positively to it. The moral: it is never too early to start singing lullabies.
Premature babies are the best proof that this is so. Studies with hundreds of babies born prematurely and with low birth weight show that their oxygen saturation shoots up only fifteen minutes after a lullaby begins to play. Taking into account that if the oxygen saturation drops too low, the risk of death skyrockets, the effect is tremendously beneficial.
Not only that. Another British study carried out with thirty-seven pediatric patients from the Great Ormond Street Hospital in London showed that the relaxing effect of a lullaby in children up to four years of age is much more intense than that of reading a bedtime story to them . Especially when it comes to reducing the heart rate and relieving pain.
After all, we must not forget that we are born predisposed to interpret music. Another recent Canadian neuroscientific study showed that at just six months of age many babies are already able to distinguish between a major and a minor musical key. Specifically, 33% have this innate virtue, a percentage identical to that of adults who have not received musical training.
If, in addition to allowing their natural instincts to emerge, we facilitate the way for the little ones to receive musical training as soon as they are one year old, the benefits will be, never better said, sounded. Scientists at McMaster University (Hamilton, Canada) showed a few years ago that teaching music to children before they are able to speak, or even walk, triggers the number of times they smile, makes them communicate better and, brain level, it provides early and sophisticated responses to music. In short, all advantages.
A few years ago, experts in sleep physiology first created sleeping songs from the brain music of a series of insomniacs. That is, they prepared a sound version of brain waves to induce drowsiness, since, they argued, music is composed of a series of sound oscillations that vary in rhythm, volume, amplitude, tones … And brain activity consists of electrical oscillations. The translation, therefore, should be relatively easy. But do those mental lullabies sound good? Not always. At times they identified a clear and pleasant melody, and at other times the songs seemed cacophonous. However, in all cases the improvement in sleep quality reached 75%, confirming that the method works.
The bars of Lullaby are familiar to all of us, that children’s melody that incorporates stuffed animals, music boxes and mobiles that hang over babies’ cribs . It was composed by Johannes Brahms (1833 – 1897), the famous German composer. Technically it would be the piece Wiegenlied, op. 49, no. 4. Op. Is the abbreviation of opus, a word of Latin origin that means ‘work’ and that is used to classify the musical works of a composer according to the date they were written. Ludwig van Beethoven’s work consists of 138 opus; Brahms’ 122.
In the scores we can also find the term posthumous opus , which is used to designate the compositions published or discovered after the death of the composer.
