To celebrate new beginnings, here’s a bit of news about how healing music helps premature babies. So tiny, so precious, such a miracle. Florida State University, as it turns out, has the only clinical degree-granting music therapy program for premature babies in the US, developed by Jayne Standley.

Standley has conducted numerous experiments and has come up with some astounding findings. She has found out that, for example, when testing babies from 1 to 8 months old, the youngest infants preferred their mother’s voice, while the older infants liked listening to lullabies; and that music is understood even by fetuses, who will reduce their heart rate, move, or kick in response to music.

Preemies often need to be taught to suck, swallow and breathe, to remain calm in the over-stimulation of the neonatal intensive care unit and/or to bond with their mother, and music has been used to help with all of these concerns. Standley’s latest guess? That these babies will grow up to have fewer problems such as attention deficit and hyperactivity.

Read more about her research with healing music and premature babies

This entry was posted on Saturday, May 26th, 2007 at 4:33 pm and is filed under Healing Music. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.