As we continue to understand how music affects the brain, the more we appreciate that we are “hardwired” for music. We are built to create it.

No group is more instructive in this regard than humans in their primacy: babies. Scientific studies of infants and music, where entire laboratories-cum-nurseries are devoted to their scrutiny, have taught us that babies are instinctively musical.

Indeed, we hardly need science to tell us that babies dig good tunes, for parents in all cultures speak to their tots in the same manner, using a lilting, melodic, repetitive, musical prosody, dubbed “motherese.” Babies will always attune more to words spoken to them in a melodic manner than flat spoken language.

The ABC song helps toddlers learn and remember the alphabet because they are hardwired for music. They will invariably pay more attention to musical sounds than disordered notes. Countless viral sensation YouTube videos of screaming babies suddenly soothed by reggae, hip-hop, and even techno are testament to this.

How do scientists study what kind of music non-verbal babies like? The same way mothers do: by observing their behavior and responding to it. Scientists have meticulously cataloged what music babies express an interest in or ignore, and the kinds of emotional reactions they have to the notes tooted at them by recording if they turn towards or away from a speaker. In one early paper on the reactions of babies to music, Harvard biologists determined that “fretting and turning away from the music source occurred more frequently during the dissonant than the consonant versions.” Conclusion: babies prefer consonant (sweet sounding) noises to dissonant (sour ones).

Research on babies also revealed something few anticipated: each and every one of us is born with perfect pitch. This is because the baby brain is hyperconnected — there are thousands more connections between the neurons in the brain of an infant than in the brain of an adult. It seems all babies live in a synesthetic haze, where every smell is tinged with color, sound is infused with color, every smell colored with sound — a hallucinogenic explosion where all senses blend with one another in a carnivalesque whirlwind of experience. No wonder babies perpetually look simultaneously exhilarated, overwhelmed and exhausted.