(MENAFN- Khaleej Times)

From the very beginning, our lives are shaped by sound. Even before birth, a foetus is cradled in the rhythm of the mother's heartbeat, the whoosh of blood, and the muffled melody of outside voices and songs. During the critical first 1,500 days following conception, the brain undergoes explosive growth, building the neural architecture that will eventually support learning, health, and emotional well-being.

In this context, my work lives right at the intersection of neuroscience, neonatology, and music. It asks a simple question with profound consequences: how can we use sound and music to protect the developing brain now, rather than waiting to treat problems later?

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Around the world, the concept of“music as medicine” has graduated from a metaphor into actual clinical practice. Carefully designed musical interventions are now being used alongside traditional medical care to lower stress, aid recovery, and improve quality of life. It is true that, unlike a pill, music does not have milligrams or a chemical formula-but it absolutely has a dose, a timing, and side effects. Evidence shows that for infants and young children, music can slow a racing heart, stabilise breathing, ease signs of pain, and encourage sleep. Therefore, when offered in a controlled, evidence-based way, music becomes a gentle, non-pharmacological tool that supports a child's biology rather than working against it.

This is particularly important in the earliest period of life. The young brain is not a finished organ waiting to be“activated”; it is being wired in real time by experience. Sound is one of the first senses to come online in the womb, and it shapes how neural networks organise themselves. Regular patterns of rhythm and melody give the brain something predictable to“lock onto”, strengthening connections involved in attention, emotional regulation and later, language. In our electroencephalography (EEG) work, where we measure brain activity with small scalp sensors, we can literally see how structured sound changes the infant brain's electrical rhythms over seconds and minutes, long before we see differences in behaviour.

Beyond physiology, however, music is also a profound learning environment. Even very young infants can recognise familiar melodies, anticipate when a phrase is about to end, and show genuine surprise when a musical pattern is broken. In this way, musical play cultivates the very same skills that are crucial for success later in school: the ability to sustain attention, to switch between expectations, and to associate sounds with meaning. When a parent sings a simple song while touching, rocking, or looking into their baby's eyes, the child is not only entertained but also learning that human communication is patterned, responsive, and emotionally meaningful. Over months and years, these thousands of tiny musical“conversations” may support vocabulary, comprehension and the child's sense that the world is coherent and trustworthy.

The power of music becomes even more evident in the Neonatal Intensive Care Unit (NICU). Every year, premature birth places more than 13 million babies globally into a highly medicalised environment, filled with alarms, mechanical ventilation, and bright lights. These infants are fragile; while they absolutely need technology to survive, their developing brains are also susceptible to stress and chaotic sensory input. Too much noise-or the wrong kind of noise-can destabilise their heart rates and breathing, potentially interfering with healthy brain development. That is why we speak about creating a "therapeutic soundscape" in the NICU: reducing harmful noise and purposefully adding the right kinds of sound at the right moments. In this setting, music can be utilised as a treatment tool. And when done properly, with sound levels kept within safe limits and timed to the baby's sleep-wake and feeding cycles, music sessions can calm stress responses, support weight gain and improve parent–infant contact. Most importantly, they promote family-centred care: parents are no longer only passive observers of machines, but active partners in their baby's treatment.

Importance of parental singing

Parental singing is, in many ways, the most natural“medicine” we have. The mother's and father's voices are already deeply familiar to the infant from pregnancy, and they carry both biological information (such as pitch and timbre) and emotional meaning. In our recent study, published in the PLoS One journal (Papatzikis et al., 2025), we explored exactly this question: how do different voices shape premature infants' brain activity in the NICU?

In that work, premature infants listened to live singing from four people: their mother, their father, a female and a male music therapist. While each person sang, we recorded the babies' brainwaves with quantitative EEG. We found that both parents' voices clearly changed the infants' brain activity, in positive but also in slightly different ways. The mother's voice tended to produce the strongest slow-wave brain activity during simple, repeated sounds, but it was often the father's lower-pitched voice that elicited the largest changes in this same brain rhythm, during the more complex stimuli, like a lullaby. In simple terms, these findings suggest that fathers are not just optional extras in early care: their singing may provide a unique, fundamental stimulus for the developing brain.

This approach aligns perfectly with a broader movement in neonatology towards genuine, family-centred care. When parents are encouraged to sing, talk, and touch their babies-even amidst the tubes and monitors-they are able to reclaim their role as primary caregivers. And then, something remarkable happens when they do this: their nervous systems synchronise. The baby's heart rate and breathing settle closer to the parent's rhythm, and the parent's own stress levels often decrease. Over time, this mutual regulation helps lay the groundwork for secure attachment, resilience in the face of later adversity, and better mental health outcomes. Music offers a practical, culturally adaptable way to build this foundation right at the bedside.

Looking ahead, the question for societies such as the United Arab Emirates is not whether music and parental singing“work”, but how seriously we want to invest in them. And for this, the declaration of 2026 as the“Year of the Family” in the UAE offers a unique opportunity. It allows us to think of family policy not only in terms of housing and employment but also in terms of the sensory and emotional worlds we create for our youngest citizens. Funding music medicine practices in NICUs, designing quieter hospital environments, training parents in safe, soothing singing routines, and bringing these ideas into community health centers are all realistic, actionable steps. And while such investments are modest compared to the long-term costs of developmental and mental-health difficulties, they can yield benefits across the entire lifespan. We are looking at stronger cognitive foundations, better school readiness, reduced parental stress, and, ultimately, more cohesive families and communities. When we use music wisely in those first 1,500 days, we are doing much more than comforting a fragile baby for a few minutes.

We are, quite literally, composing part of that child's neural score for resilience, longevity and social connection in the decades to come.

By Professor Efthymios Papatzikis, School of Health Sciences and Psychology, Canadian University Dubai

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