Baby's Music Project

As parents it's not always about hacking what you gotta do, sometimes it's about digging into fun projects that you can share in with your child. One of my favorite examples of this is my ongoing Music Project. Personally, I enjoy listening to music, but I don't make music or have a deep scholarly education on the subject. Nevertheless, I wanted to offer my child the chance to build an eclectic musical appreciation.

As a side note, all of the links I will share will take you to public Spotify playlists, but feel free to find similar playlists on whatever service you prefer. If you find better public playlists out there that exemplify the music, or have other recommendations that you think should be included, please let me know! I also created custom Google Assistant commands to initiate the music, which I'll save for a future post.

Classical Traditional Music

The "Mozart Effect" refers to the theory that listening to Mozart (or music from other classical composers) can boost your IQ, or that for children it can stimulate their mental development. Don't get me wrong - there's nothing wrong with classical music, but the over-emphasis on this genre for babies strikes me as being a very Western-dominated point of view. What about babies in other parts of the world, who develop their minds around, not to mention derive enjoyment from, their own local music? So I decided to collect music playlists from various ethnical traditions, limited by my own experience of what stands out as particularly distinct and memorable. Really, this was a way to provide my baby with early exposure to instruments, languages, and sounds from around the world.

1. African
2. Chinese
3. Composers - I've included my own custom playlist for classical composers, as just one of many other worthwhile traditional musical options.
4. Filipino
5. Hawaiian
6. Indian
7. Irish
8. Japanese
9. Native American - This is a beautiful playlist that we often use during nap times as well so that our baby associates flutes with sleepiness (to mixed results).
10. Opera
11. Piano
12. Spanish

This search culminated in developing my own take on the "Mozart Effect." I created a playlist called Nerd Baby Genius, which are all instrumental, orchestral (with a preference towards symphonic) tracks from our favorite movies, TV shows, video games, and anime. This is the good stuff, though I'm not sure our kid appreciates it as much as we do... yet.

Musical Decade Eras

After the first year or so, I decided to switch things up a bit, by collecting prominent music from different decades in our own culture. This started with the initial impossible objective of organizing several specific genres of certain decades (think "50s Jazz" and "60s Rock"), but eventually I realized that focusing on the highlights of each decade across all genres was a much more straightforward path. Spotify does a good job of maintaining playlists for all the decades between the 1950s and 2010s, but we had to dig up the earlier decades on our own.

1. 20s, 30s, and 40s
2. 50s
3. 60s
4. 70s
5. 80s
6. 90s
7. 2000s
8. 2010s

Others

There are a couple playlists here that should be in any parents' collection. As our daughter has developed her own taste in music, we have obliged her by creating some additional playlists as well.

1. Lullabies - Who knew that there were so many lullaby version of popular songs?
2. White Noise - This isn't something that I'll play for her very often, but it's an option if you're looking for something more natural for baby to sleep to.
3. Cocomelon - I recommend creating your own rotating playlist so you can stick with the songs you can tolerate and don't go insane. :)
4. Toddler TV Shows - I created this playlist recently from her other favorite TV shows. She LOVES it.

In the words of Sam Harris, author of Waking Up and creator of the Waking Up app, "the quality of the journey must be more important than those fleeting moments when you actually seem to arrive at your destination, because most of your life is the journey. Most of your life is a process of solving problems. It is not, and never will be, the condition of basking in the absence of all problems... So the frame of mind in which you do these things will determine the quality of your life." To me, music is a wonderful analogy for life in this regard. We don't listen to music to get to the end, and in the same way, we shouldn't let these in-between moments in life pass us by.