Wondering What to Do with Your Baby Einstein Refund? ? Take a Look at Music is?MATH!
The idea of providing young children with tools to increase their intelligence is, of course, an admirable one and very appealing to parents who want the best for their children. And the Baby Einstein product did that in some cases when the parents took an active role in the learning process.
Baby Einstein’s demise was not just in the failure of the material to provide real food for intelligence increases, but very much in the way parents and caregivers used it as a simple “babysitting” tool. This proved effective since, as a video product, the child tended to be absorbed into it both visually and audibly.
But that may not be the best way for an infant to learn. ScienceDaily, in February 2009, reported on an EU-funded research project, called EmCAP, which brought together what many would consider an unlikely consortium comprising both neuroscientists and music technologists. Project coordinator was Susan Denham.
“The babies were presented with sequences of sounds of different tone colour – different musical instruments, if you like – but all of the same pitch. Occasionally, you play a sound of a different pitch and watch the EEG to see if they produce a distinctive reaction to this deviant sound,” explains Denham.
“Similar tests were done to see if babies were sensitive to rhythmic and melodic patterns, too. Denham says while this sort of technique has been used for many years on adults to measure pre-conscious detection of unexpected events, it has seldom been used with newborns. The big advantage is that it can work even when somebody is unconscious. So, the babies being asleep was not a problem.”
“The results were exciting, demonstrating newborns had a sense of pitch from birth, and this was not something learned through experience as had previously been thought. The experiments showed they are even sensitive to the beat in music.”
“The bottom line is we come into the world with brains that are continually looking for patterns, and telling us when there is something unexpected we should learn about,” says Denham
Enter a product called Music is…MATH! developed several years ago by two world class musicians, composers and sound engineers at a company called Sound-Science.com. What Jay Oliver and William Lenihan did was to create an audio product that gives the babies a “preview” of such concepts as math, spatial relationships, symmetry and motion, among others.
Using a proprietary technology they call rhythm/pitch mapping, they created an audio learning system that does exactly what the above scientific study says happens. The CD-based program is an ambient & scientific audio experience that delivers stimulating intellectual concepts to the early developing brain.
This is not to be confused with the so-called Mozart Effect which worked in some tests with college students. Mozart’s music may be mathematically symmetrical, but it’s way too complex to be processed and understood by a newborn baby’s brain. Neither Mozart, nor any other classical composer, ever created their music for this purpose.
Music is…MATH!, on the other hand, uses scientifically-constructed musical sequences and tones, tailored to the baby’s cognitive understanding at that stage of his/her development. Oliver and Lenihan have created a passive learning system that compliments the essential stimulation of interaction with parents or caregivers.
Since the “music” is presented in the background, the baby can choose to absorb the information at their own pace and time. Further, each CD is tailored to match the specific stage of development for the infant, progressing in 6 month steps from 0-6 months up to 18-24 months.
Read some of the research here to discover how remarkable this technology is. Then put your Baby Einstein refund to good use.
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