Development of auditory and spontaneous movement responses to music over the first postnatal year

Musicality – the biological predisposition to perceive, appreciate, and produce music (Honing, 2018; Trehub, 2003) – is increasingly recognised as a fundamental aspect of human nature. Numerous accounts suggest that engaging with music through movement is at the core of musicality (Honing et al., 2015; Schachner et al., 2009; Trehub et al., 2015). Functionally, such engagement can be broken down into two fundamental components of neurocognitive development: the ability to perceive and recognise music (sensory component), and the ability to produce movement responses that are temporally aligned with the musical structure, from coordinated vocalizations and percussive actions up to complex dance moves (motor component; Brown, 2022; Trehub, 2003; Trevarthen, 1999). Despite this inherent predisposition toward music, the developmental trajectory of infants’ musicality remains largely unknown (see Nguyen et al., 2023a, for a review). While there is increasing research on infant music perception, including controlled manipulations of select musical features, we know less about the translation of perception into action, namely the ontogenesis of infants’ spontaneous movements to music (see Fujii et al., 2014; Nguyen et al., 2023b; Zentner and Eerola, 2010). Furthermore, making our understanding of music-driven motor engagement even more incomplete, no studies to date have looked at both brain activity and spontaneous body movements simultaneously, especially during the first year of life. Accordingly, how the processing of music and its features is transformed into organised motor responses remains underexplored.

The sensory component of musicality, namely music perception, can be measured using electroencephalography (EEG), specifically by recording cortical auditory evoked potentials (event-related potentials [ERP]). One of these responses is the infantile P1, a phase-locked EEG positivity peaking around 200-300 ms after an auditory stimulus (Chen et al., 2016; Kushnerenko et al., 2002; Wunderlich et al., 2006). The infantile P1 has been observed in response to both musical notes and speech segments. Auditory evoked potentials, when elicited isochronously, can also be captured using frequency domain analyses (Damsma et al., 2024; Novembre and Iannetti, 2018), such as auditory steady-state responses (ASSR), which are also called steady-state evoked potentials (SSEP, e.g. Cirelli et al., 2016; Nave et al., 2022). These neural responses can provide insight into the developing auditory system and its ability to encode musical structure. Using these neurophysiological measures, prior research has shown that newborns and infants are sensitive to beat structure, pitch deviants, and tone interval regularities (Bianco et al., 2025; Edalati et al., 2023; Háden et al., 2022; Háden et al., 2015; Háden et al., 2009; Stefanics et al., 2009; Winkler et al., 2009). Despite these promising results, the neurophysiology of early music processing – particularly its developmental trajectory – remains not fully understood. Here, our primary goal is to investigate infants’ neural encoding of music utilizing both ERP and ASSR approaches to characterize how such neural responses change across the first year of life.

Another component of musicality is the capacity to move to music (motor component; Brown, 2022; Fitch, 2015; Honing et al., 2015; Trehub et al., 2015). This capacity is linked to infants not only recognising musical structure but also moving their bodies in response to it. Even though this capacity appears to develop precociously, as evidenced by the fact that even 28-35 week-old foetuses move to music (Kisilevsky et al., 2004), very few studies have systematically examined music-driven spontaneous body movements in infants. An influential paper by Zentner and Eerola, 2010 reported that infants across a large age range (from 5 to 24 months) showed more spontaneous rhythmic movements in response to classical music and children’s music compared to infant-directed speech. Importantly, their movements were not synchronized with the musical input, even though a small degree of tempo flexibility was observed (i.e. faster musical tempi evoked relatively faster movement periodicities). The lack of synchrony between music and body movements has also been reported in younger (i.e. 3-4 months old) infants listening to popular music (Fujii et al., 2014). Furthermore, another study testing 7-month-old infants reported more movement in response to (sung) playsongs compared to lullabies but did not assess movement synchrony (Nguyen et al., 2023b). Despite these initial investigations, it remains unclear when infants begin to move in response to music, which specific movements are evoked, and when these movements become coordinated with the music. Moreover, a critical limitation in existing research is the lack of a control condition to determine whether these movements are driven specifically by musical structure or reflect general motor activity in response to auditory input. As a second goal, this study is the first to systematically test the gradual development of music-induced movements in different age groups across the first year of life.

Music engages both sensory and motor systems, yet different musical features may differentially shape infants’ engagement with music. While rhythm has been widely studied in early music cognition, pitch is another salient acoustic cue that could play a role in auditory-motor engagement, particularly in infancy. High pitch is a defining feature of infant-directed speech (Fernald and Simon, 1984), among other features, such as exaggerated intonation, slower tempo, and simplified vocabulary (Fernald and Kuhl, 1987; Kuhl and Meltzoff, 1982). Similarly, infants most frequently listen to music characterized by high pitch (Costa-Giomi and Sun, 2016; Nakata and Trehub, 2011). Reflecting its prominence, high pitch is found to be one of the most prominent features thought to effectively capture (Conrad et al., 2011; Eckerdal and Merker, 2009; Trainor, 1996; Trainor and Zacharias, 1998) and guide infants’ attention (Lense et al., 2022; Trainor and Desjardins, 2002). On the neural level, infants are also better at encoding pitch deviances in the high voice of polyphonic music, thus showing high voice superiority from 3 months of age (Marie and Trainor, 2013; Marie and Trainor, 2014). Taken together, these findings indicate that higher-pitch music would amplify infants’ neural responses (i.e. sensory component) in comparison to lower-pitch music. On the other hand, we know that adults move more to music with greater energy in lower frequencies (Cameron et al., 2022; Stupacher et al., 2013; Stupacher et al., 2016; Van Dyck et al., 2013). Yet, it remains unknown whether low-pitch music elicits increased movement in infants, as it does in adults, or whether infants’ attraction to high pitch also extends to enhance their motor responses. As a third goal, we thus investigate how musical pitch affects infants’ sensory and motor components.

We presented infants, aged 3, 6, and 12 months, with instrumental refrains of children’s songs (music), shuffled versions of the same songs (shuffled music), and transpositions of the songs that would either emphasize the melody (high pitch) or the bassline (low pitch). We recorded infants’ neural activity using EEG and specifically extracted ERPs and ASSR as indices of infants’ neural response to the various auditory stimuli. We also analysed spontaneous (full-body) movement kinematics using automated video-based motion tracking (DeepLabCut) and extracted principal movements using principal component analysis (see Figure 1, c.f. Bigand et al., 2024a; Toiviainen et al., 2010). By adopting a cross-sectional design, we aimed to characterize the maturation of both auditory and movement responses across infancy. We hypothesized that auditory responses would be enhanced when triggered by music compared to shuffled music. This hypothesis was based on the notion that musical structure, notably eroded in the shuffled musical stimuli, is essential to attract infants’ attention towards predictable events (Kouider et al., 2015; Lense et al., 2022). Similarly, based on previous evidence comparing movement responses to music vs speech and silence (Fujii et al., 2014; Zentner and Eerola, 2010), we expected the presence of musical structure to increase the likelihood of spontaneous movements in response to music compared to shuffled music, but we did not have a specific hypothesis about which particular movements would be produced. We further hypothesized that infants would show enhanced neural responses to high- compared to low-pitch music and explored co-occurring differences in spontaneous movements. Generally, we aimed to characterize the maturation of both auditory and motor responses as infants get older. By studying both sensory and motor components of musicality, we aimed to deepen our understanding of when and how infants learn to transform what they perceive into spontaneous movements, eventually leading to the emergence of synchronization to music (Brown, 2022; Fitch, 2015; Honing et al., 2015; Patel and Iversen, 2014).