It is an almost magical sight: a roomful of adults at a concert, swaying in unison to a beat that seems to pull their bodies like invisible strings. But when does this deeply human capacity to fuse music with movement first flicker to life? A groundbreaking new study shows that infants do not spontaneously dance to music until they are nearly one year old—and even then, they cannot match their movements to the rhythm. The findings, published in eLife, reveal a staggered developmental timeline in which the brain learns to hear music long before the body learns to move to it.
To capture this unfolding musicality, Trinh Nguyen and colleagues at the Istituto Italiano di Tecnologia and the University of Vienna recruited 79 healthy infants aged three, six, and twelve months. Each baby sat on a caregiver’s lap in front of a screen displaying slowly blossoming flowers, while speakers played instrumental refrains of children’s songs. Crucially, the team simultaneously recorded two streams of data: electroencephalography (EEG) to measure neural responses, and high-resolution video later analysed with DeepLabCut, an open‑source machine‑learning tool that tracks body parts without physical markers. The auditory stimuli came in three flavours: intact music, a “shuffled” version in which the sequence of tones was scrambled to destroy musical structure, and versions shifted to high or low pitch registers to test whether pitch height influences auditory‑motor engagement.
The EEG results painted a clear picture: from as early as three months, the infant brain distinguishes structured music from scrambled sound. The researchers extracted event‑related potentials—precisely timed neural signatures in response to each tone—and found that across all age groups, the brain’s auditory cortex produced a significantly enhanced response to intact music. This was not merely a loudness or complexity effect; the brain was detecting the statistical regularities of a melody, the predictable beat‑to‑beat relationships that define a song. In addition, auditory steady‑state responses, which reflect how the brain locks onto continuous acoustic streams, were robust regardless of age. The sensory hardware for music perception, it appears, is already on‑line and remarkably mature within the first months of life.
Yet the motor story was entirely different. The researchers used principal component analysis to boil down the infants’ spontaneous wiggles into ten principal movements, including front‑back rocking, side sway, proto‑clapping, leg‑kicking, arm‑pedalling, and whole‑body wiggling. When they modelled the volume of movement as a function of music type and age, a striking interaction emerged: only the twelve‑month‑olds moved significantly more when listening to intact music compared with the scrambled version. The younger infants showed no such music‑specific motor engagement. The extra movement in the one‑year‑olds was not a full‑body dance; it was concentrated in the upper body, specifically rocking, swaying, and arm actions—a seated repertoire that indicates the first hints of an intentional somatic response to music.
Equally revealing was what the babies could not do. In no age group did the team find evidence of rhythmic entrainment—the ability to synchronise body movements to the beat of the music. Even the most active twelve‑month‑olds did not time their rocking or arm flaps to the pulse. This absence points to a fundamental principle of motor development: the brain first gains the capacity to initiate and control individual muscle synergies, and only later assembles them into precisely timed, coordinated wholes. The dorsal auditory stream, a brain pathway thought to be critical for beat perception and sensorimotor coupling, matures slowly. It connects the auditory temporal cortex to premotor and motor regions, and its gradual myelination across infancy may explain why rhythmically coordinated movement arrives after the first birthday.
“Across the first year, infants seem to consistently move their lower body while slowly increasing their capacity for more complex upper‑body and whole‑body movements while seated, as we saw in the twelve‑month‑olds,” explains lead author Trinh Nguyen. “We believe this increasing complexity is linked to the gradual maturation of the dorsal auditory stream.” Senior author Giacomo Novembre adds that moving to music “emerges early in development and may reflect a biological predisposition that eventually leads to dance‑like behaviours, although these motor responses remain underdeveloped before twelve months of age.”
The study upends a common intuition: that babies bounce to music from the very beginning because music and movement are inextricably fused in our biology. Instead, it sketches a two‑stage developmental program. First, the auditory system rapidly tunes itself to the structural regularities of music—a feat accomplished in infancy’s earliest months. Second, the motor system slowly learns to translate that sonic blueprint into physical action, with the first voluntary, music‑driven movements appearing only toward the end of the first year. The ability to lock those movements onto an external beat takes even longer, likely emerging in the second year and beyond.
These findings have broad implications for understanding the roots of human communication and social bonding. Rhythmic synchrony is a foundation of dancing, singing together, and even conversation; mapping its developmental trajectory in infancy could help identify early markers of conditions such as developmental coordination disorder or autism, where sensorimotor timing is often atypical. The research team is now planning follow‑up studies that will track the same infants longitudinally to pinpoint exactly when beat synchronisation emerges, and to probe what mysterious functional significance music‑driven movement holds for the developing social brain.
Subject of Research: People (infants)
Article Title: Development of auditory and spontaneous movement responses to music over the first postnatal year
News Publication Date: 7-Jul-2026
Web References:
– http://dx.doi.org/10.7554/eLife.107088.4
– https://elifesciences.org/subjects/neuroscience
References: Nguyen et al., eLife (2026), DOI: 10.7554/eLife.107088.4
Image Credits: Nguyen et al. (CC BY 4.0)
Keywords: Neuroscience, auditory perception, infants, developmental stages, kinematics, music processing, movement, beat synchronisation, dorsal auditory stream
