Menuhin says sing to unborn

Press, 6 January 1987, Page 26

Menuhin says sing to unborn

By ROBIN CHARTERIS London correspondent Talk to your plants to ensure healthy growth, says Prince Charles — now sing to your unborn baby for the same result.

That is the belief of the world-renowned violinist, Sir Yehudi Menuhin, who attributes some of his musical skills to the crooning of his mother and father before birth.

He told the inaugural meeting of the British Society for Pre-natal Psychology in Medicine that the vibrations of parental songs were felt by the unborn foetus and gave a sense of harmony with the world the child was about to enter. •

“I am sure that a baby which does not receive these melodic vibrations from its mother’s voice suffers from emotional starvation, just as lack of food leads to physical starvation,” Sir Yehudi said.

The value of singing aloud to unborn babies had long been known and was widely practised by mothers in primitive societies, he told the new

organisation, whose members believe that the physical and psychic development of the human being cannot be separated.

Playing records was not an adequate substitute, partly because orchestral music was too complex for the foetus, and partly because it was the physical vibrations caused by the mother’s voice which were all-important.

Sir Yehudi said a factor in his own musical development had been the singing he had subconsciously heard from his parents before he was bom.

The president of the society, Dr Michele Clement, said singing to the unborn was the equivalent of a pre-natal vaccination which provided an essential “memory imprint” for a child. She has developed a method of recording the internal sounds made by a mother’s body during the first 16 weeks of pregnancy, to which babies reacted “with’ great excitement” when played back after birth.