REPORT ON CRYING BABIES AND SOUNDS as appeared in the "ANNUAL JOURNAL OF THE ROYAL COLLEGE OF GENERAL PRACTITIONERS" (Britain)-1988

At the invite of the publishers (Sabrecrown), this report was written by Roger Wannell - a good honours graduate of Bristol University (England) who at the time of writing was married with two young children the older of whom was a persistent crier as a baby. A part time Lecturer in Sociology at a local college Roger spent 18 months looking into and researching the affects of sounds on babies following the chance discovery of Jaygee Babysooth sounds. He was overseen in the project by several notable researchers in psychology, audiology and paediatrics at several universities and hospitals in the U.K. and had communication with other experts in the field in the U.S.A. and France.

A Summary of the medical report is as follows;-
1- Approx. 10% of babies cry for no apparent reason and cannot be consoled by normal means.
2- Using sound can help especially the 'Jaygee Babysooth'® sounds. 3- Heartbeats played at 80 beats per minute will only work on 36% of new borns for up to 10 days after birth. Thereafter they can distress the baby and will fail to soothe.
4- A metronome played at 72 beats a minute calms only 22% of ne-onates.
5- Music box type soothers playing lullabies etc. proved only 11% effective.
6- Intra-uterine sounds ('womb music') is between 83-98% effective BUT only if played from birth. WITHIN 4 WEEKS OF BIRTH ONLY 10% OF BABIES WILL BE CALMED if first hearing the sounds then, and MOST BABIES WILL NOT RESPOND BY 4 MONTHS - EVEN IF STARTED AT BIRTH.
7- Jaygee Babysooth sounds calm 92% of crying babies; can be started on the infant within 3 months of birth and soothe for months.
Now read full report for full details of this summary.

'A SOUND APPROACH TO CRYING BABIES' - R.J.Wannell
Crying Babies
It has been estimated that around 10% of babies born per annum cry persistently (Grey, 1987) They cry for no apparent reason, suffer no obvious ailments, and are not easily comforted. Parents feel harassed by their inability to console their distraught offspring. Often they attempt to rationalise the situation by focussing on wind, teething, feeding, nappies (diapers), colic, levels of stimulation and so forth. A viscious cycle develops, where the parents lose sleep, become tense and anxious and experience ambivalent emotions toward the baby. These emotions can become so strong that in rare cases they uncontrollable and tragedy can occur. If not treated, rejection and ignoring the infant can take place within a few months of birth (Haslem 1984). What then can be done to change the direction of the circle to make it virtuous?

Modes of soothing and sound
A few years a go in a London hospital lecture theatre, I was speaking about this subject when an Australian researcher in the audience suggested that it was feasible that we all have modes of soothing, and that on an individual basis one mode outweighs and dominates others. She saw these modes as tactile, visual, audio and motion.Let us consider this in terms of babies. A mother naturally uses the tactile mode, with help from the others. She picks up her crying baby, cuddles it firmly - usually to the left (heart) side of her body - strokes the baby's body and rocks to a fro whilst gently pacing up and down, while gently cooing or chatting to it in a low pitched voice. If this approach fails, she will switch to another. She might turn to the visual mode, hoping to distract the baby with, for example brightly coloured objects. If the baby still does not respond, the mother seeks solution to the problem; checking nappies (diapers), feeding, and so on. The she adopts the same approach as before. If this still provokes no quietening response, she changes to the motion mode, which includes rocking the baby in her arms, then the pushchair, or rocker.

But what if none of this works?. Can there be something missing - such as sound ?
Babies are born with full hearing capacity, They are capable of hearing what we hear. But is the sound heard, received, and interpreted by neonates in the same way as it is by an adult, or is it possible that certain frequencies trigger a more positive response than others ? Hutt (et al. 1968) found that this seemed to be the case, Lower frequencies presented to babies caused greater stimulation than higher ones, and those at 125Hz caused the greatest reaction; we will come back to this later.It helps to explain something that we have all noticed - namely, that sounds per se do not soothe our infants. Our favourite pieces of music tend to be screamed through; to soothe the sounds must be specific. For example Lee Salk tested babies using tapes of their mothers' heartbeats and found that if babies heard it from birth for four days they were calmed and seemed to cry less; but if played after that period, babies either ignored the sound or actually became distressed by it, this was especially so if it was speeded up from 80 (resting rhythm) to 120 beats per minute. (Macfarlane 1977) This exercise was repeated in Japan and showed a 36% soporific success with neonates up to 10 days old (Murooka 1975) A metronome played at 72 beats a minute also proved basically ineffective, producing only a 22% calming response (Murooka 1975)In Britain similar tests were conducted on a Musical box type soother and this proved only 11 percent effective (Callis 1984)

Sounds that please
So called soothing devices based on heartbeats ands simple music are not going to work and at best influence one third of crying babies. However, parents find random sounds that do please; the vacuum cleaner is one, washing machines are another; flute music can work as can loudly played music that is rhythmic (NOT beat).(Wannell 1983). The problem with the former ones is that habituation can occur, with the baby learning, or choosing, to ignore them , usually by the fourth month.But now back to the 125Hz and the baby still in the womb.

The sound of the Uterus
In 1971, with the invention of the miniature microphone, it was found that the uterus is a very noisy place, mean sound pressure levels (SPL) of between 85dB and 95dB (Rossner and Doherty 1979). The former is a fairly steady baseline of sound, while the latter is caused by blood being driven through the uterine vasculature by the action of the heart. The level of the sound heard by the foetus is akin to what we would experience on the pavement of a busy street or or in a station of the underground with trains constantly passing through; heard of course, in a way similar to having the sound presented through earphones; loud to the listener but generally inaudible to the rest of the world. One of the main frequencies of the womb is 125Hz.Experiments on pregnant mothers in the 1930s by Sontag, where he played music to the foetus, showed even then that babies are masked from external sounds to a very great degree (Macfarlane 1977) Only low frequency sounds from speakers actually placed on the abdomen elicited any response. For 40 weeks the foetus lives in the sound cocoon.

Intra-uterine sound soothers ('womb music')
Armed with the above knowledge about intra uterine sounds (commonly called womb sounds or womb music) it became logical to suppose that neonates and, indeed, older babies might respond to them when distressed. This theory was tested several times in the mid to late 1970s; and was indeed found to be the case, but with a twist in the tail; only neonates responded. Research by Murooka (1975) of Japan showed that 403 crying new born babies responded to various sounds taken from the womb, namely at the aorta, vein, navel cord and the placenta, The response was dramatic and affected 83.9% of the baibies. This reasearch using Murooka's recordings, was replicated by Rossner and Doherty in the USA who got 90% success with babies aged from birth to 8 days. In Britain intra uterine sounds were used by Callis (1984) in Sheffield, and there, using longer playings of the sounds they achieved a staggering 98.4% success rate on 27 babies aged from birth to 10 days. Obviously with this evidence from three continents it can be seen that womb sounds calm crying babies.So is that the end of the story? Alas no !

Early habituation of intra-uterine sounds
As stated it seems irrefutable that neonates (new borns) are comforted by 'womb music' . This soothing is however, very short lived. According to Murooka(1975) …"It is necessary to try womb sound recordings before the baby is 2 weeks … when the baby is 2 weeks old or older the recordings will gradually lose their effects" In other words, the level of stimuli bomdarding the newborns seems rapidly to remove the innate memoryof the womb. Murooka confirms this by stating "If womb sounds are played to babies who are ONE MONTH OLD OR OLDER AND THEY HAVE NEVER HEARD THESE BEFORE then ONLY ONE IN TEN (10%) OF BABIES WILL BE QUIETENED by those intra uterine sounds' But what of those whose womb memory is constantly being reinforced by playing the sound from birth ? It seems that habituation occurs after 2-3 weeks of life and in the main the soothing is gone by 16 weeks at the outside. Is that the end of a sound approach to calming a crying baby ?. No.

Rhythmic sound with pink noise soother
In 1979 a different sound soother appeared in Britain by accident. A tape recorder malfunctioned when it was meant to be recording a persistent crying baby as part of of a soothing sounds experiment. On playback the recording was found to have a marked soporific affect on the 6 week old infant. It was later tested in 1980 on 324 babies in hospitals and homes with ages ranging from birth to nine months (Haslem 1984). The freak tape calmed 91% of all the babies for as long as they needed it provided the sounds were presented to the infant within the first 12-14 weeks of birth.The recording was analysed as being a cassette of "rhythmical foreground sounds with three distinctive rhythms" and a 'background of pink noise"

What the experts say
Unlike intra uterine sounds, heartbeats, metronomes, music box type devices etc, this rhythmic sound soother is not impaired by habituation, and babies do not selectively ignore the sounds. One theory for this was put by Dr.Kevin Murphy, Consultant Audiologist at the Royal Berkshire Hospital - considered to be an expert on sounds and babies - who believed that womb sounds, heartbeats and others are simple sounds with simple rhythms, whereas the chance recording was more complex. He said that the Jaygee Babysooth sounds contain sound at several different frequencies and contain three main rhythms. These are repeated but spaced sufficiently apart to prevent the baby adapting, and thus, selevtively ignoring any one pattern of sound. Thus the soothing effect is maintained. (Rodwell 1987). And what are these 'miraculous frequencies'? When analysed on a spectrograph it was found, quite incredibly, that the frequencies were almost the same as those found in a mother's womb as given by Murooka and Rossner and Doherty, and had the same dominating frequency of 125Hz.

Conclusion
The evidence presented above, which is but a skimming of what is available, seems to show that specific forms of sound do cause babies to cease crying. The conclusions are that devices replicating heartbeats or simple music will be of little benefit. Those that record the sounds of the womb will be effective if started on neonates at birth and only if needed for a short term, whereas for older babies and for longer-term relief, the more mechanical rhythmic sounds with pink noise are the answer for the 10 % of persistant criers where sound is the missing soothing ingredient.

[References.

Callis P.M.(1984) 'The testing and comparison of the intra-uterine sound against other methods for calming babies' - Midwives Chronicle and Nursing Notes (U.K.)96 pp336-338

Gray P (1987) 'Crying Baby-How to cope' London, Wisebuy Publications p4.

Haslem Dr.David (1984) 'Sleepless children" London. Futura Publications.

Hutt C., Hutt S.J. Lenard H.J. et al. (1968) 'Auditory response to in the human neonate' . Nature 218 p888-890

Macfarlane Dr Aidan (1977) 'The Psychology of Childbirth' London, Fontana Publications Ch.1.

Murooka, Araki, Sasaki et al. (1975) 'Induction of rest and sleep on the neonates by the rhythm of the maternal blood flow'. Nippon Med. School.(Japan) Vol. 42. No 3.pp 77-79.

Rodwell L. (1987) 'The sounds for silence' The Times (London) 5th November.

Rossner B.S and Doherty N.E. (1979)'The response of Neonates to intra uterine sounds" (USA) Developing Medicine and Child Neurology 21. Pp 724-728

Wannell R.J. 'Sounds that stop a baby crying' New Generation (U.K) 2 pp 28-29 ]

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