Foreign and Russian Psychophysiological Studies of Musical Abilities of Newborns: a Review

We provide an overview of foreign and Russian psychophysiological research on the problem of musical abilities of newborns. We discuss aspects of formation of the musical ear (pitch, harmonic, timbre, dynamic) and rhythm. As a result, we identified the following auditory abilities of infants: 1. The ability to detect and decay of sound; 2. The ability to automatically detect repetitive sound sequences; 3. The categorization of surrounding sound; and 4. The semantic aspects of musical perception that receive intensive development in the first months of life. The state-of-the-art diagnostic methods, such as optical tomography and magnetoencephalography, allow direct approach to solving the problem of how the musical abilities are formed in early ontogeny.

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