From Bad Bunny to David Attenborough, why babies fall for certain sounds
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A pediatrician breaks down why your baby locks in for certain voices and songs, and how to put it to work.
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I have a lot of favorite viral videos, but one that recently caught my eye is the perfect intersection of adorable and fascinating. A delicious baby, in the throes of discontent, hears the first few bars of a Bad Bunny song and completely forgets that he’s unhappy. The shoulders start going. The face breaks open. And then the part that kills me, his little arm shoots up into the air, summoning the carefree groove of an island club-goer. Somewhere in that tiny body a beat has been recognized and answered. Millions of us watched, and I could totally relate.
I get it. I watched the Super Bowl. I have also watched several of the other Bad Bunny videos circling the internet many times over, for reasons I won’t say, none of which involve his… musical talents. So I too am met with no option but to become hypnotized the second his impossibly hot voice comes through the speaker, then to gyrate the moment the beat drops. But I suspect it’s not all auditory in my case.
My son had his own version of this as a baby, and his icon was less reggaeton superstar and more elderly British naturalist. When he was a couple of months old, we discovered that the voice of David Attenborough could do what no white-noise machine or frantic bouncing ever managed. The moment Attenborough started narrating, my son locked in. If he was fussing, he stopped. If he was crying, he settled. If he was busy gumming a toy, he would pause and cock his head to take it in, like he had somewhere more important to be. (For the record, he has not grown up to be a naturalist, a birdwatcher, or a documentarian. The man just liked the voice.)
My son had none of my complications, of course. For a baby, the pull toward one voice or one song is pure sound and nothing else, which is what makes it worth understanding. So, to better understand what’s at play here, I asked Dr. Michael Glazier, chief medical officer and pediatrician at Bluebird Kids Health.
Do babies recognize music from the womb
“Babies start to hear things in the third trimester before they are born, and this is when they first start to recognize their mother’s voice,” Glazier says. By the time they arrive, the basic hardware is ready to go. The cochlea, the part of the inner ear that turns sound waves into signals the brain can read, is up and running, and the auditory cortex, the region devoted to hearing, is already at work.
What they cannot do yet is understand a single word. What they can do is absorb everything around the words. The rhythm, the intonation, the particular cadence of their mother’s speech, and the emotional weather underneath it. “They learn to recognize the emotional tone of speech before they understand the meaning of words,” Glazier says. Because every sound reaches them through amniotic fluid, they arrive with a built-in preference for low, deep frequencies, and for the songs, stories, and languages they marinated in during those final months.
Which is all to say your newborn is not a blank slate. They show up already partial to you.
The Attenborough effect
Once babies are out in the world and taking it in, their taste shifts a little. They tend to like speech that is higher pitched and slower, which is exactly why parents everywhere, without being taught, slide into that exaggerated, sing-song register researchers call parentese.
Stress changes the request, though. When a baby is worked up and looking to be soothed, they reach back toward the sounds of the womb, lower in pitch and slower in tempo, the range of a mother’s breathing and her heartbeat. “When they are stressed and need to be soothed, they have a predilection for lower pitch and slower tempo voices and sounds,” Glazier says.
And there is the whole Attenborough mystery, solved. That voice is nothing if not low and unhurried. My son had never heard it in the womb, so familiarity was not the draw. The acoustics were. Attenborough seems to broadcast on exactly the frequency a stressed-out infant finds calming.
The Bad Bunny effect
The grooving baby is running the opposite program. “When babies are alert and seeking stimulation, more upbeat, faster rhythm songs are preferred,” Glazier says. That baby is not looking to be soothed. He is looking to party. The strong, insistent beat is the whole appeal, and it is doing precisely what an alert, curious brain wants it to do.
How to actually use this at 3 a.m.
Once you know which mode your baby is in, you can meet them there.
For a baby who needs calming, familiarity beats novelty every time. “They are soothed by predictability and repetition,” Glazier says, and those steadying sounds tend to be low and simple, like your own voice or the rhythm of a resting heartbeat. And if you worry that your singing voice sounds like a cat in heat clawing its way out of a dumpster, here’s a bit of comfort and encouragement. Babies respond to “the consistency and familiarity of their voice,” Glazier says, far more than to any kind of vocal talent. Your off-key rendition of the same three songs is doing exactly what it is supposed to.
For a baby who is bright-eyed and ready to engage, bring the tempo up. This is dance-party territory, the Bad Bunny end of the pool.
My own kids never had to look far for volume. They come from a family of loud musicians. Their father, their uncles, and their grandfather are vocalists and guitar, bass, and drum players, the kind of people whose speaking voices carry across a crowded room and whose singing can cut across state lines. My children grew up steeped in sound from day one, and it shows.
Why some babies barely blink
Not every baby reacts like the internet’s favorite Bad Bunny fan (next to Jon Hamm, of course), and that is completely normal. Babies come wired with different temperaments, which shape “how they react to external stimulation,” Glazier says. Some are highly alert and startle at the smallest thing. Others are easy, unbothered, hard to ruffle. Their nervous systems also filter sound differently. “Some babies may turn quickly to new noises, while others remain calm and have just a slight change in facial expression,” he says.
He draws a useful distinction between two things parents tend to blur together. A temperament is “who their baby is,” their basic operating style. A sensory profile is how they take in and process the world around them. Both shape the response to music. A baby with high auditory sensitivity “will often respond to music immediately,” Glazier says, while one with lower sensitivity “may only react to music with stronger beats.” So if your baby tunes out the gentle lullaby playlist but perks up the second the bass drops, that is information, not indifference.
The one thing worth watching for
All of this is delightful right up until the rare moment it is not, so it helps to know what a healthy response looks like. Newborns come with a set of built-in reflexes, and one of them is the acoustic startle, the little “eye blinking and brief body jerks to loud, unexpected sounds,” Glazier says. It is why your pediatrician might clap sharply near your newborn and watch what happens. If loud, sudden sounds get no reaction at all, or if your baby does not seem to respond to familiar voices over time, that is worth a conversation with your doctor rather than a wait-and-see.
Listen for the tell
For most of us, the daily reality is simpler and a lot more fun. Your baby is constantly telling you how they want to meet the world, in the language of shoulder wiggles and sudden stillness and the particular way they hush for one specific voice. You just have to listen for it. Mine, as it turned out, wanted a nature documentary. I only wish someone had warned me sooner to keep Attenborough on standby.
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