Key Findings:
- Songs can regulate infants’ attention and stress, offering caregivers a strategy to engage or soothe them
- Listening to live performances captures infants’ attention and synchronizes their heartrates with other members of the audience
- Coordinated movements with a stranger increase infants’ helpfulness
While working at a daycare as an undergraduate student, Dr. Laura Cirelli was struck by the power of the “clean up song” to organize a room full of toddlers around a shared goal. Now, as a professor of psychology at the University of Toronto, she designs creative studies to explore the ways that musicality and dance develop across childhood and, in turn, support other areas of development. For her work, Dr. Cirelli has been recognized with the 2025 FABBS Early Career Award by the International Congress of Infant Studies.
Across different cultures, people collectively invest significant resources in their musical interests, whether going to classes and concerts or merely singing in the shower. Intriguingly, adults around the world also adapt their voices, using recognizable “baby talk,” to engage children in music at an early age. To show how universal this practice is, Dr. Cirelli worked alongside a large team of international researchers to source recordings of speech and song from communities around the world, ranging from interconnected urban centers to remote hunter gatherer societies exposed to minimal outside influence. Adults from 187 different countries could reliably identify when adults were singing or speaking to infants, even if they did not understand the language, suggesting that this practice of vocally engaging infants unites vastly different cultures. The next logical question, which Dr. Cirelli’s work helps to answer, is why infant-directed musicality and dance are so prevalent across time and space.
A key insight is that song and dance can help parents with some of their greatest challenges: regulating a baby’s emotions and developing healthy relationships. In one study, Dr. Cirelli asked mothers to sing Twinkle Twinkle Little Star to their infants, sometimes in an upbeat, excited manner and other times in a slow, soft manner. Dr. Cirelli observed that the playful style of singing made infants more alert. By contrast, physiological measures revealed that both infants and their mothers relaxed during the calm rendition. After a long day, it is not only the babies who feel soothed by a lullaby! Just like the volume dial on a radio, caregivers can essentially turn up or down a baby’s energy level with their songs.
The power of music to regulate and synchronize feelings can even work across a whole crowd of strangers. Using the innovative McMaster University LIVELab and working with Bryna Berezowska, a local composer and musician, Dr. Cirelli staged a musical performance for infants and carefully monitored the attention and heartrate of her young audience. Forty babies attended a live performance of the show together, while others watched the recording of that exact event in the theater or in their own home. The live theater performance had remarkable effects on infants’ attention and physiology, compared to the other conditions. She remembers that “as soon as Bryna began to sing, there was this hush.” The data also showed that infants paid close attention and even synchronized their heartrates with other attendees at the live show. Synchrony – especially through dance – may be key to the other powerful function of music in children’s development: developing kindness and helpfulness toward others.
Dancing to a shared song encourages multiple individuals to coordinate their movements and even their goals, as Dr. Cirelli observed during the “clean up song.” Remarkably, the feeling of connectedness does not stop when the music turns off. In one of her most influential studies to date, Dr. Cirelli found that after moving in sync with a stranger, 14-month-old infants were more likely to recognize a person’s need for help and to offer aid spontaneously. Whether attending a massive concert or organizing toddlers to help each other, Dr. Cirelli’s work emphasizes the power of music and dance for fostering social connection with our fellow human beings.
Dr. Cirelli readily shares her findings with the public, noting that teachers and parents have access to these free and helpful musical strategies for working with children. She has been featured in numerous popular press outlets, including The Canadian Broadcasting Company’s “The Nature of Things”, a science-based TV show, and National Public Radio. She also publishes a lab newsletter to cultivate a community of parents who are interested in music and child development. Her central message is one of hope, as her work reveals the power of song and dance for easing daily struggles of caregiving and increasing joy in children’s earliest years. For parents who might feel shy about their voice, Dr. Cirelli says “it doesn’t matter if you are going on American Idol; babies just want to hear your voice, see your face, and have that one-on-one experience with you.”
Future Directions:
- Examine the role of music in different relationships, such as grandparents connecting with infants over video calls
- Capture the active role of infants in shaping musical interactions with their caregivers
