"Is Your Baby Getting Enough Music?": Musical Interventions into Gestational Labor

Abstract

Introduction In a 2019 video titled “Is Your Baby Getting Enough Music?” for the children’s charity UNICEF, Dr. Ibrahim Baltagi offers a “mini parenting masterclass” on how “music affects your baby’s brain.” Over the course of the fiveminute video, Baltagi, a lecturer in music at Lebanese International University, details the benefits of music for child development in early years. The viewer sees a multiracial cast of infants, children, and parents happily making and listening to music. We are told that for babies and young children, “music ignites all areas of child development and skills for school readiness,” while “learning to play a musical instrument can improve mathematical learning.” In the video Baltagi extends these benefits to the period before birth, and to the fetus in utero. He suggests that listening to music during pregnancy has “a soothing and uplifting effect on the pregnant woman.” It has a “positive influence on the unborn baby” insofar as “it is proven that music has a role in brain development before birth.” Consequently, Baltagi advises the viewer to “start music with your children as early as possible.”1 This video is illustrative of common assertions made in the media and discourse surrounding parenting about music’s capacity to stage valuable interventions into pregnancy. Various sound technologies, playlists, services, educational campaigns, and programs that posit music as a key resource in producing emotionally resilient and intelligent future children, and generating appropriate familial bonds prior to birth, are now available.2 Many of these interventions have focused on AngloAmerican children in the (over)developed