This is a wonderful Chinese Lullaby – baby music from Northeast China sent to me by Ling Ling, a lovely music therapist whom I met at a recent Music and Medicine symposium in New York where I presented on healing lullaby music in the neonatal ward.
The best part of the symposium for me, was hearing the lullabies sung by the participants. There were represenetatives from ten countries around the world, China being one of them.
How do your ears attune to this lullaby? This is a synthesized version with a solo singer.
What feeling does it evoke in you? How does it compare to the next video below?
This is another rendition of the same lullaby performed by an orchestra and a solo singing performance:
Chinese music scales are pentatonic in nature (based upon five notes – similar to the black keys on a piano keyboard). Pentatonic scales were widely used in ancient times. They are very natural and suitable for lullaby music.
Wordless singing has been medically proven to lower blood pressure, heart rate, increase focus and quality of sleep amongst neonates in the NICU unit. In this video clip, I am guiding a new mother to sing with her baby in the neonatal ward of Meir Hospital. This lovely mother, appropriately named Shira, which in Hebrew means “singing – song” has taken to singing along with the monitor beeping in order to lower her own level of stress. You can hear the music composed for the healing music research project.
It’s three a.m. You’ve bissfully dozed into deep slumber. Suddenly…
Whaaa… a cry from the other room, gets you back up again. Your eyes are barely open, but it doesn’t really matter – the wailing acts like a sonic radar leading you directly to it’s source… your little loved one.
Well, at this point, you might not be feeling the ecstacy of love …
How can you get your baby back to sleep in the midst of her wailing? Here are a few helpful tips:
1) When you are with your baby, hugging her, or nursing her, take time to reconnect with yourself. When you focus inside and make your inner calm your first priority, this will help your baby to relax as well.
2) Hum to your baby. Using the sound MMM… is soothing. MMM is the seed sound of all languages. Every word for mother, in every language, contains this sound. In ancient Hebrew – the M sound, and the letter M, represents “from the inside out”. The shape of the letter “מ” is round and depicts the movement from inside out.
Remember that as you calm yourself first, this will have a positive impact upon your baby.
3) Play soft acoustic music in the background. Soothing lullaby music consisting of singing without wordshas been scientifically proven to increase positive effect of sleep in neonates. Dr. Alice Cash has also produced a very effective soothing lullaby music cds . I particularly like the one entitled Go To Sleep with healing sounds of soft piano. Her work is worthy of note – for surgical use as well, and for various other healing purposes.
I’d love to hear from you.
What is your biggest question about getting your baby back to sleep?
This is an abstract of a new reserarch article which was published last month in Music and Medicine Journal regarding a healing lullaby music project in the neonatal intensive care unit. What was found is that live singing lowers blood pressure, heart rate, increases focus and quality of sleep, amongst the premature babies, their parents and the medical staff functioned better as well…
Among the developmentally supportive care modalities that have been tested in the treatment of preterm infants, music interventions have been tested quite intensively. This article reports on the environmental, cultural, and philosophical considerations of a research program that studied the effects of live music, wordless singing, and rhythm upon neonates in a Middle Eastern NICU hospital unit. The cultural setting and dynamics of the NICU created a unique challenge which involved the discovery of music as an intervention that effectively enhanced communication within a culturally divergent population. At the same time, music decreased stress and increased a sense of humanity in the intensive care unit setting.
Meir Medical Center, Kfar-Saba, and Sackler Faculty of Medicine, Tel Aviv University, Tel Aviv, Israel
What happens when you meet the core of yourself, and it is raw, and unedited? It can feel terrifying. Is that what keeps us from sharing our vulnerability? It won’t be heard. What I have to say might get shut down?
I am pondering the power of women, the power of vulnerability, the power of choice in expression.
I am a courageous person, and I have been feeling SO vulnerable lately. Meeting with deep vulnerability. And then I go to sing to the babies and mothers in a healing lullaby music course. Together we hum together the wordless Cosmic Melody(downloadable for free here) and my heart melts.
Seeing the babies, so tender, so open, hearing the mothers’ voices blend, harmoniously, melts my heart too.
I invite you to consider this idea… Perhaps your vulnerability is your biggest virtue? Perhaps it is your greatest power? And if it were, how would you live differently? How would you respond to your own child?
I invite you to allow your baby to experience your vulnerablity. The vulnerability in your voice can be a very powerful aphrodisiac for your baby.
I believe that it is the very power of Mother Music.
This is a photo of an ancient rattle, unearthed at Tel Meggido, also known as Armageddon. Thousands of these rattles have been found in Galilee, in the North of Israel. They are amongst the most popular form of musical instrument found in archaelological sites throughout Ancient Israel. According to researcher, Joachim Braun, this attests to the fact of their widespread cultic use.
In his book – “Did God Have a Wife”, researcher William Dever discusses how folk religion and home shrines have a connection to child birth. Could it be that the women sang and used such rattles to shake away “the evil eye”, while singing Divine praises to protect the small baby from the myriad of dangers encountered during child birth?
This new blog is my small baby. It feels BIG! For the last nine months I have been preparing for this moment. Finally, the baby is born, and I am it’s mother. Funny, it feels like I am the one who has been born. Finally singing out what I know to be true from my heart, which has also been proven by medical research, that your voice is important!
And that is the point of this blog my dear reader.
I will be blogging about lullaby music, mother music, and how your voice can help help to create harmony and peacefulness with you and your small baby, whether he or she has been born yet or not.
Here’s an clip of the live lullaby music research conducted in an Israeli neonatal ward, 50/50% Jewish – Arab, over a three year period. The multi-cultural, multi-lingual background of the parents and medical staff, neccessitated singing without words. Small baby, big impact, music peace…
How do you use your voice with your small baby? What lullaby music do you sing? And if you don’t sing, why not?
It’s three a.m. You’ve bissfully dozed into deep slumber. Suddenly… 
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