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Prenatal Music Therapy

Music Therapy plays an important role during pregnancy. Mothers during pregnancy often experience stress and anxiety, the use of music therapy helps the mother to relieve her stress and return to a relax state. Recent studies over the last few years has shown that music stimulation is beneficial during pregnancy and that an unborn baby is able to see, hear, touch and learn. Through the technologies today, such as ultrasound and fiber optics we are able to observe the movements of the unborn child. In these observations, we learned that the baby is capable of expressing its needs, preferences, and interests through movements in the womb. By the third week of pregnancy, babies start to develop their hearing and by the fifth month, they their ear structures would be fully matured. By this time, the fetus will begin to hear sounds from the outer world through vibrations of the instruments and this is where music therapy comes in handy to increase the bonding of the mother and the fetus.

Prenatal music therapy has three main benefits.

Stress Relief

Most pregnant women suffered from a lot of stress which affects the baby negatively too. When under stress, the body will release Norepinephrine and Cortisol hormones which will increase blood pressure and weaken the immune systems. Unfortunately, prenatal stress also increases the likelihood of the child having anxiety, mental retardation, autism, an depression. Music therapists uses music to elevate the stress threshold of an expectant mother which assist her to maintain a relaxed state. During a music therapy session, the mother learns to listen to her internal rhythms and listen to the movements and reactions of the fetus in response to her voice and music. This will help reduce the mother's level of stress, and prepares her for the birth of her child.

Mother and Child Bonding before Birth

Communication between the mother and fetus is essential during pregnancy. One way of strengthening the bond between the two is by music therapy. Music stimulation helps to develop the fetus's nervous system structurally and functionally. The unborn child especially prefers the voice of their mother. The most effective way to enhance the communication is through singing. Lullabies are the most popular songs sung by mothers. Singing lullabies is a wonderful way for mothers to express their love and have the baby be familiarize by their mother's melodies and intonations which will provide them a sense of security when they are born because it will feel just like how they were in the womb. Electronic Voice Phenomena studies have shown that the father's voice captivates the fetus from feet to the abdomen that will lead the baby to start walking at a younger age, and the mother's voice captivates the fetus from waist to head which will strengthen the baby's neck and upper limbs. Not only does prenatal singing benefit the fetus, it also help produce endorphins that automatically reduces the perception of pain and help relax breathing. The fetus has a preference for music; observations have shown the fetus's movements are gentle when listening to soothing music, while on the other hand where there are dissonances included in the music, their movements are much more rhythmic and bigger like rolling. This states that the fetus would enjoy hearing slow pace passages of Baroque music (Vivaldi and Handel) and lullabies sung by their mother.

Language Development

Music is said to be the unborn child's beginning of language learning. It can be consider as a pre-linguistic language that prepares the Auditory Sensory System to listen, combine, and produce language sounds. The fetus learns through the voice of their mother, not only from speech but songs. The sound is received by the baby through bone conduction when the mother speaks. The singing voice is said to have a wider range of frequencies than speech. Prenatal sounds are important during the prenatal period because it forms the basis of future learning and behaviour.