Audio Experiment

Today, I had the opportunity of spending some time with my five month old nephew, Chance. I enjoy spending time with the little guy. I find that watching small children explore the world around them and develop into full-fledged people to be fascinating. Children seem to be the only class of people who are actually more amazed by the world around them than I am.

Since I had sometime to spend with Chance, I decided to introduce him to music. At his stage, his brain is rapidly developing, and he is getting the hang of aggregating information across multiple senses. Music provides an opportunity to stimulate multiple cortical areas simultaneously, and easily allows even a young mind to start making correlations between different senses, and thus connections between different areas of the brain.

I sat down in my computer chair with him, and brought up a playlist in Audacious. I started out with Flobots (I've been on a Flobots kick lately). The initial instrumental sounds coming from the speakers piqued his interest. He began looking around attempting to determine where the sounds were coming from. Here we have our first crossover, which happened within the span of a few seconds: hearing for direction, and vision for location. He was at a disadvantage, being five months old and not understanding what speakers or recordings are, but that's not really the point. While he couldn't seem to determine that the speakers were the source of the sounds, he did alternate visual direction between forward facing and looking down (where the subwoofer is). After the instrumental intro, the lyrics began. He met this with wide-eyed amazement. It was clear that he could recognize the sound of a human voice and that it was saying something. He became intensely interested in finding where this person was, and kept alternating wonder-struck looks between me (I was singing along) and the speakers. Within a few songs, it seemed as if he was starting to grasp the abstract concept of "the person who isn't there". I believe this was a good set to start with, because it has sound (auditory cortex), varied and intricate rhythms (parietal lobe for spacial reasoning and mathematics), and an intense amount of language (Broca's and Wernike's areas), along with the attempts to combine auditory information with a visual lock.

Next, we moved on to Jazz, as rendered by the late, great, Maynard Ferguson. This introduced new sound and rhythm patterns, both of which Chance reacted to with interest. His movements, while still not well coordinated by a long shot, showed variance with these rhythms when compared to those from Flobots. This reaction to differences was a neat thing to see. I decided at this point to add a somatic component to the experience. For best effect, I pulled out the subwoofer from under my desk, and placed his feet on it. He's become fascinated with playing with his feet recently, so why not include them? At first the vibrations were slightly startling to him, but he quickly adapted (as children do) and seemed to recognize a correlation between the sounds he was hearing and the vibrations he was feeling from the subwoofer. This made him laugh and smile quite a bit, which I find to be a good thing. He also showed a stronger reaction to the rhythms by trying to "dance" at this point. Now we had all of the previous areas activated and sharing information along with strong senory-motor reinforcement. I also put his hands up on the desk and let him feel the faster vibrations caused by the treble sounds. He enjoyed this, and laughed quite a bit. When I put him back in my lap, he would look down when there was a bass lead, and toward the desk when there was a treble lead. I find this behavior to be fascinating.

Unfortunately, this is where our experience came to an end, as my sister had returned to retrieve her child, who was still smiling as he left. I will have to make it a point to include some of this, and extend the experience each time I get a chance to spend time with Chance.

An unfathomable amount of experience goes into creating a person. There are innumerable connections that are formed and changed as experience is acquired and we, as people, learn to turn what we are into who we are. Given that we are the sum of our past perceptions, I think will try my best to give my nephew the best chances I can at becoming a well-formed person.

....I can't wait to teach him how to talk.