Infants learn an incredible amount of information about their sound environment, including language and music, before they even turn 1 year of age. Using laboratory-based randomized controlled studies, our research has previously shown that highly social and engaging music experiences can enhance infants’ neural processing of speech, a hallmark of language development. Yet we know very little about infants’ everyday music experiences. In a new study, we developed a crowdsourced approach to annotate a large longitudinal dataset of daylong audio recordings made in North American infants’ home environments. Our analysis revealed that infants experience very little music compared to speech. Further, most of the music is from electronic devices unintended for the infant, whereas most of the speech is specifically directed at infants from a person. Read her award-winning essay.
