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  • "Is Your Baby Getting Enough Music?"Musical Interventions into Gestational Labor
  • Eric Drott (bio) and Marie Thompson (bio)

Introduction

In a 2019 video titled "Is Your Baby Getting Enough Music?" for the children's charity UNICEF, Dr. Ibrahim Baltagi offers a "mini parenting masterclass" on how "music affects your baby's brain." Over the course of the five-minute video, Baltagi, a lecturer in music at Lebanese International University, details the benefits of music for child development in early years. The viewer sees a multiracial cast of infants, children, and parents happily making and listening to music. We are told that for babies and young children, "music ignites all areas of child development and skills for school readiness," while "learning to play a musical instrument can improve mathematical learning." In the video Baltagi extends these benefits to the period before birth, and to the fetus in utero. He suggests that listening to music during pregnancy has "a soothing and uplifting effect on the pregnant woman." It has a "positive influence on the unborn baby" insofar as "it is proven that music has a role in brain development before birth." Consequently, Baltagi advises the viewer to "start music with your children as early as possible."1

This video is illustrative of common assertions made in the media and discourse surrounding parenting about music's capacity to stage valuable interventions into pregnancy. Various sound technologies, playlists, services, educational campaigns, and programs that posit music as a key resource in producing emotionally resilient and intelligent future children, and generating appropriate familial bonds prior to birth, are now available.2 Many of these interventions have focused on Anglo-American children in the (over)developed [End Page 125] Global North. However, as evidenced by the UNICEF video, some organizations, companies, and institutions have addressed parents and (soon-to-be) infants outside of North America and Europe.3 These attempts to harness music's prenatal benefits are symptomatic of a wider cultural tendency to promote music as an ideal accompaniment to social reproduction. As we have argued elsewhere, arts institutions, advertisers, media companies, and streaming services have sought to emphasize music's reproductive utility, which is to say, its ability to help listeners take care of themselves and others, enhance sociality and subjectification, and improve health and well-being.4

In this article we distinguish between two types of musical interventions into pregnancy and what we refer to herein as "gestational labor." On the one hand, music has been sold as a reproductive technology that can improve both mother and future child. We take A Sound Beginning, a US-based family bonding subscription service, as exemplary of this tendency: through a personalized "Womb Song," the program promises to "attune" mother and baby, helping them raise a calm, loving, and attentive child. On the other hand, charities and cultural institutions have configured music as a social service that can support disadvantaged future mothers and their children. Here, we critically examine Carnegie Hall's Lullaby Project, which engages new mothers and mothers-to-be to cocompose a lullaby for their babies. Noting the coherences and differences between A Sound Beginning and the Lullaby Project, we situate them in relation to post-Fordist organizations of social reproduction, whereby responsibility for looking after oneself and others is increasingly privatized, and racial histories of pregnancy and maternity, through which "good" motherhood is racialized as white and the threat of "bad" motherhood is imbricated with anti-Blackness.

Central to the ideological work performed by both A Sound Beginning and the Lullaby Project is this very emphasis on mothers, mothering, and motherhood—whether "good" or "bad." It is ideological not least of all because those who do gestational labor are not necessarily mothers (motherhood does not follow from every pregnancy), nor is mothering synonymous with womanhood [End Page 126] (the practices we call "mothering" can be performed by people of different genders both within and outside the nuclear family). Hence, if we recurrently use the term "mother" to refer to the pregnant person who is the target of their respective musical interventions, our use of this term herein reflects the gendered language that both adopt and the (hetero)sexual and gendered division of...

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