The state of research on prenatal hearing, to choose a starting point, is roughly as follows: the anatomical structure of the auditory apparatus begins to develop during the fourth week of pregnancy. It reaches its final form by around week 20, at which point a foetus will exhibit bodily reactions to external acoustic stimuli. The auditory nerves between the inner ears and the brain are connected at around week 28, which is when hearing as we commonly understand it begins. In the 32nd week of pregnancy, foetuses become able to recognise their mothers’ voices and can distinguish them from those of everybody else. And from week 35 onward, future babies learn to distinguish between languages, rhythms, and even individual pitches.
Research hence indicates that children are born with a well-stocked “toolbox” for engaging with sound and music. And they can also, believe it or not, distinguish between all phonemes of all of the world’s languages. What would seem like a miracle is simply the outcome of evolution: all human beings are born musical. And encouraging them in this should, therefore, be a society-wide responsibility that goes without saying. In truly “musicalised” conditions—which, to state it upfront, would be those where music is not always treated as simply a nice extra—all newcomers to our world would learn to develop their miraculous-seeming gifts. They’d be shown how to enjoy, play, understand, use, and revere music.
It would be unfair to say that nothing like this is taking place. Musical training is almost never entirely neglected in school curricula—and this statement holds true worldwide. However, it also isn’t typically resourced to an appropriate extent. The fact that music could be a central or even preeminent school subject, a Swiss Army knife of sorts among the basic skills of general education, is something that decisionmakers haven’t yet understood.
This is, however, the new state of knowledge that recent years have seen more and more studies make clear: music would seem to have a near-inexhaustible range of beneficial effects on mental, physical, and emotional well-being. It nourishes social skills, empathic ability, and mental and sensory resilience all the way into old age.
Doing justice to this knowledge (not least budgetarily) must, from here on out, be viewed as one of the touchstones of responsible policy. It hence needs to be understood that music and the other arts are not mere amenities of a wealthy and civilised society but much rather among such a society’s essential preconditions.
