Music Has a Unique Way of Improving a Baby’s Mood

Baby mood music — Free for use under the Pixabay Content License

Music is known to be more than just melodious. Scientists have found that singing can improve the mood of infants, and the more parents sing, the more improvement in the emotional state of babies.

What the research says

A large study by Yale and the University of Auckland found the more parents sang at home, the better infants’ moods were. The research, published in the journal Child Development in May of 2025, is the first randomized controlled trial to show that singing to infants at home results in measurable mood benefits.

The work was led by Samuel Mehr of The Music Lab, with funding from the U.S. National Institutes of Health, the Royal Society of New Zealand Te Apārangi, and the University of Auckland.

Across four weeks, parent-reported infant mood was found to be substantially better among families in which parents sang more, compared to a control group.

The study included 110 parents and their babies, most under four months of age, and used a novel smartphone-based ecological momentary assessment methodology to capture real-time effects. Infant mood was demonstrably better across all domains, not just in relation to the music.

Furthermore, parents were observed to be motivated to engage in more singing when their infants showed signs of discomfort. Infant-directed singing generally produces post-intervention improvements in infant mood, but not in caregiver mood within the four-week period.

“Such behaviors have been shown to confer emotional benefits to infants, with downstream benefits for the whole family,” says the study. Given the associations between infant mood and an increased quality of life for both the infant and parent, researchers note that this simple, accessible, safe, and free intervention supports overall emotional wellbeing.

How Music Impacts Babies

Mothers around the world sing to their infants on a regular basis in an attempt to regulate their affect—the process by which a person controls their emotions and mood.

Compared to infant-directed or adult-directed speech, 6- to 9-month-olds are able to remain happy or neutral for much longer when exposed to recordings of play songs. When faced with angry fussing, infants are better able to recover after hearing their mother’s multimodal singing as opposed to her speech. Furthermore, mothers’ play songs are more effective than lullabies at reducing arousal in Western infants.

It is important to recognize that the infant’s environment is rich with musical input. A mother’s speech to her infant takes the form of music, with a variety of musical aspects that indicate its emotional meaning.

Emotional valence in speech and song directed to infants facilitates caregiver-child interactions and modulates infants’ affect and arousal during the first year of life. These communication strategies, characterized by happy emotion and similarity to music, have been shown to have particular efficacy when they take the form of familiar songs; they promote positive infant affect and engagement.

Infants showed longer looking times when happy music and congruent pairs were presented, which supports the infants’ sensitivity to emotional congruency. Lively-playful speech and song captured more attention, but infants preferred songs to speech in both languages, and showed a native language preference.

What Goes On In The Brain

A study by researchers at the University of Washington’s Institute for Learning & Brain Sciences (I-LABS) found that a music-rich curriculum involving play sessions helped 9-month-old babies’ brains process both music and new speech sounds.

“Our study is the first in young babies to suggest that exposure to a repeated rhythmic pattern in music also helps them hear and predict patterns in speech,” said lead author Christina Zhao, a postdoctoral fellow at I-LABS. “This has important implications because it means that early music experience may have far-reaching impacts on children’s cognitive skills.”

The babies who listened to music had stronger brain responses to the disrupted rhythm in both music and speech, in comparison to the control group. This suggests that the babies who participated in the musical play sessions were able to better detect patterns in what they were hearing.

“The beauty of our findings is that they highlight the cognitive benefits that can come from engaging in music,” said Zhao. “The study shows that musical experience can boost and diversify children’s cognitive skills, which is critically important in today’s world.”

In addition, early musical training has benefits for infants long before they can walk or talk. Babies who participated in interactive music classes with their parents had earlier-developing brain responses to the melodic structure of music.

They were better at communicating with others earlier on, such as by using gestures to convey ideas. In terms of social behavior, the babies smiled more, were calmer and easier to soothe, and showed less separation distress and irritability when things didn’t go their way.

What This Means for Families

These findings suggest that low-cost interventions have the potential to improve the physical and emotional health of both infants and caregivers. The studies reveal that caregivers sang to, and played recorded music for, younger and older babies at comparably high rates.

In turn, babies actively responded to their favorite songs and recordings by showing positive emotions, moving to the music, and expressing attention. An infant’s early exposure to music has a profound effect on his or her later development, both in terms of musical ability and the capacity to process and respond to emotional tones in speech.

Exposure to the mother’s voice, beginning before birth, is essential to a strong parent-baby bond. In sum, musical communication is a simple but very effective tool to facilitate the caregiver-infant bond and nurture early development.