Add to playlist: The world’s first scientifically tested song to make babies happy.
Matt Corby will always have a special place close to this mother’s heart….and not ‘cos I fancy him (well, not entirely).
It’s more that the dulcet tones of Mr Corby was the ONLY soundtrack that would stop my eldest son from screaming his lungs out on every. single. car trip. Strapping my then baby into his car capsule would involve tears from both him and me as I tried to keep it together as he’d give out those enormous sobs that are hard-wired to meltdown any new-Mum’s nervous system. Then, one miraculous day, the sounds of Matt Corby’s ‘Brother’ came on the stereo and all was silent. Like, seriously, “is he breathing?”, silent. And the greatest thing? It kept working!
I started telling every other new-parent that I knew about the magical effects of Matt, but, perhaps unsurprisingly, it didn’t work on their babies! At the time I had hoped that I had discovered THE soundtrack to happy babies everywhere, but it was not to be. But now, it appears that the magical track to make babies happy has indeed been cracked!
UK baby food company Cow and Gate recently teamed up with Caspar Addyman, Lecturer in Developmental Psychology at Goldsmiths in London, and music psychologist Lauren Stewart in order to see if they could create a music track that would make all babies happy – and the result is called, simply, ‘Happy’.
This catchy little ditty makes use of all the elements that babies like to rock along to – something in a major key, a simple melody, stacks of repetition, all sung by a soft, yet high, female voice. After many rounds of testing and development, the team from Cow and Gate took their song to their final round of testing, and what happened was pretty remarkable, as Caspar Addyman reports,
“We assembled about 20 of the babies in one room and played them the song all together. If you ever met an excited toddler or young baby, you will know that two and a half minutes is a long time to hold the attention of even one child, let alone two dozen. When The Happy Song played we were met by a sea of entranced little faces.”
So, we want to know, does the Happy song, work on your kid? And if not, have you tried out the Matt Corby option?
If you want to know more about how they made the Happy song, check out this video.