The Bad Way to Teach Music to Babies - Dubious YouTube Channels & Bleeping Toys 

During pregnancy: Listen to classical music. It will make the baby smarter. After birth: The wheels of the bus go round and round

there's no sharp notes to encourage parents to teach their babies the intricacies of the G mixolydian and B locrian modes before adventuring ahead with such advanced topics as D major

My twin boys were born premature, and I just assumed I had more time to learn lullabies. When they were born, I never had the time to learn them, but I wanted to give them something to latch onto, and music was the only thing I could think of... So I just sang them The Beatles. They never wanted to listen to lullabies after that, and wanted to listen to more complex music, so I just kept playing it for them. Well, they're on to their first year now and they became bored with the fake toy instruments, so I let them use real ones. I put a drum set out for them, put an old electric piano on the floor, etc. One twin can already find chords on the piano... Yeah, he's (adjusted) 12 months old, and if I play a note he can find the next one in the chord. The toys didn't help him do that - Listening to real music and playing real instruments did it. Both of them have an easier time identifying songs and melodies than they do anything else in their world, it's just a natural language for them. I still sing to them every night and they try (because they still don't speak English) to sing back to me. They have a musical headstart I could have only dreamed of.

8:02 not only are the musical choices questionable, but so are the duck facts, drakes (male ducks) don’t quack, the make a raspy thought sound that rambles on, whereas females make loud distinguished “QUACK” sounds, thus making it impossible for daddy drake to go “quack quack quack”, for the ducklings to come back back back. If you’re planning on singing about ducks, get your facts straight damn it! Edit: Fun bonus fact, ducklings don’t quack either, they squeak, they either quack or make there bloke sounds when they reach sexual maturity around 4 months (depending on the species), bonus fact two, the daddy duck shown in the video doesn’t have a drake feather, which is a feather at the end of a male ducks tail. Bonus fact three, adult ducks aren’t yellow, ever. And fun fact four, I know too much about ducks, and have been rambling on for long enough, I could go on, but I won’t. You’re welcome.

that plate cracked me up. i love that your plates are tuned to F#

piano: sharp note baby: thou shall not disgrace me with such noise! I can not comprehend these sounds of which you utter! I demand naturals!

When I was a toddler I had this Casio keyboard with a sample mic. I would just scream into it and play random crap. One day I accidentally played the first line of the Mario underground theme by ear. I went screaming to my grandma because I was so happy and I loved Mario.

honestly man, everyone knows ur not supposed to give sharp things to babies!

It's OK, we all know the correct lyrics. "Five little ducks went swimming one day / Sibelius crashed / All day long!"

*Well-meaning adult* plays nursery rhyme. *Baby* _thinking to itself_ "don't insult my intelligence".

Of course it's a dark version of the wheels on the bus. LOOK AT THE BUS'S FACE! If that doesn't scream "I'm currently digesting these children I have inside me" I don't know what does.

Baby: *can find the doggy after being asked “where’s the doggy?” Me, a 22-year old college student studying software engineering: (unironically) “damn what a genius.”

this is why I'm going to start my kids off on a carefully selected diet of Grindcore

Man I reckon if your kids heard my playing I could get them to cry.

2:51 music bitcrushed horse noise gunshots music gunshots more music bitcrushed horse noise gunshots

Oh, man, that kid naming the notes played from the piano chord was so blood-chillingly impressive. I couldn't even correctly name *one* of those fucking notes.

Great, now I have creepy kiddie shit in my recommended. It's like a hair-trigger machine gun, one mention of kids and an instant avalanche of shit on the sidebar. Excellent video by the way, completely agree.

I can’t wait to play my 3 month old some Death Grips

I remember, when as a toddler I would get frustrated with the lack of multiple octaves in these so-called 'musical toys'... Also it really offended me when I was expecting a note to play, BUT THEN CAME ANIMAL NOISES!!!

Honestly, letting babies and toddlers play around with professional quality instruments (especially synths imo) could honestly be really good for them

The cat piano is the best music toy. Fully chromatic, beats, mic, and of course melodic meows.

Lesson Learned: teach babies the LICC before their first birthday so that they can flex on all the toddlers in the daycare.

"When teaching your babies to eat you dont start with fast food" Eh sadly some parents are more than happy to let their kids grow up on chicken nuggets and fries until they wont eat anything else

"No matter how much you quack quack, Daddy duck is never coming back back" *Roasted,* hopefully with a hint of garlic.

Couldn't agree more, I essentially know music theory because of the grand piano that's been in the house since I was a toddler.

Oh god this gave me flashbacks to when my little brother was a baby and he constantly watched those crappy low-quality kids videos and no matter how much I tried to convince my parents not to let him watch that brain-rotting mass-produced garbage, they would keep letting him watch it because it's easier to keep him entertained like that instead of actually interacting with him, which is what parents should be doing. He's lucky that I play the piano so he still heard his fair share of complex music.

This learning genius never fully goes away. It is primarily due to the way education is structured in most countries (based on a model stemming from the Industrial Revolution and it shows - it works just like a factory) that we feel like we become slower at learning new things as time goes by. While it's true that our ability to pick up new skills is somewhat pushed to the background as our goals and with that our priorities change, but the fastest and most effective ways to learn something kind of always remain "participate in it". Observe others doing the thing well, try it yourself, repeat. If they can explain how they do the thing and why they do it that way, all the better, but the core of learning remains the participation.

8:55 "Banging on a drum or playing an instrument" Ouch.

As soon as I clicked on the video, my *entire* recommended page turned into Arabic toy reviews and cartoons made in Windows Movie Maker.

I feel so justified hearing all of this. People show babies total crap when we could have them watch/listen the same things adults would and they would get so much smarter later. Just imagine the potential

2:50 the horse noises sound like gun shots in the background of a 2010s hiphop song

The reason those toys and yt channels are so popular is that they're maintenance-free. You can just plop your kid in front of the tv and do something else. I personally think that if you have that mindset, just don't have kids in the first place. There is no shortcut to raising kids, you just actually have to put in the effort.

"Don't be afraid to play music of all types to your kids." _(rubs hands together)_ I can't wait to introduce my baby to grindcore.

I love this with all of my heart. "When babies are able to eat, you don't start them off with fast food. When teaching them to speak, you don't teach them slang or garbled pronunciation." Brought to my mind the advice from Schumann, "With sweetmeats, pastry and confectionery we cannot bring up children in sound health. The mental food must be as simple and nourishing as the bodily. Great composers have sufficiently provided for the former; keep to their works." I loved your criticism of the harmony in "The Wheels on the Bus". This careless randomness is not forgivable- not for a music student whose homework no one but the professor will probably hear, and definitely not for one writing for such an important, smart and sensitive audience. My god, babies listen. They listen so well. Thank you so much for this.

I spend a lot of time thinking about this, as a creator of kids music. Wish we could make kids songs with interesting complexity, but our most popular songs are always the simplest melodically, with basic instrumentation. Younger kids seem to prefer melodies with 3 notes on repeat. Our spicier compositions usually flop, so we get led down a path of creating ever simpler tunes....

So fun things about dissonance and babies, ever put a baby in front of a piano, even one very well exposed to many different varieties of music and with perfect pitch? First instinct? EXTREME DISSONANCE, ALL THE KEYS JUNG JUNG JUNG! Babies LOVE dissonance, probably because they get exposed to it so little and find it new and exciting.

ok I will say that the music is nitpicking because a much bigger problem is THE WINDSHIELD WIPERS, WHAT?!

i was stoned out of my mind at the eastern european equivalent of toys r us a few months back and suddenly got the urge to jam on some baby toys but i quickly realized that almost all keyboards ONLY had the major scale (one did have a weird combination of major and whole tone; why?). proceeded to go on a huge rant that my friend had to listen to for the rest of the day. im assumed the reason for that is twofold: a) not to annoy parents with their baby procedurally and mercilessly bashing out twelve tone series and studies in dissonance. b) and this is the most frightening, to attempt to force a positive, happy atmosphere for the baby (which is obviously not how music works in broad terms and the major scale in particular). i mean at that point why even bother raising a kid, when they're obviously gonna call you a terrible parent in 15 years anyway thanks for collecting and enhancing my sentiments in this video. thanks for being super critical and analytical of everything in general ps fuck you dad not being able to avoid housing isnt about being lazy

"Quality doesn't really matter because babies don't know any better" has hit the nail on the head. I can't believe how vastly people underestimate young kids, and kids in general, and it makes me angry.

I always give children the same respect that I would give to an adult. I don't do baby talk like "wOOOOOOoOoW! you KnOw your COOOlors!!" I say "sorry" and "excuse me" if they're in the way, or if I'm in their way. I think it's incredibly inane to treat children like they're stupid, they eventually have to learn to be smart, so why start later than necessary?

When I was very young (like, less than a year old) my parents got me hooked on these DVDs from a program called "Baby Einstein," which, in addition to a lot of other well-crafted educational material, had a few DVDs dedicated to music education, all based on different composers (I've been told Baby Mozart was my favorite). They'd play covers of great classical compositions and supplement them with eyecatching imagery like swinging pendulums and models of the planets and whatnot. To be honest, a lot of my seemingly natural abilities with music could be attributed to my parents developing my musical mind the way they did at such an early age. I'm definitely going to play those DVDs for my kids if I can still find them.

The wheels on the bus go "one day, the last star will burn out - and then... darkness.... forever.... ".. ALL DAY LONG! :)

This is why perfect pitch is rare. My parents didn't really care for my musical development.

If i ever have a kid, the first thing its gonna hear is megalovania. Cuz life's hard

Lol, the Glockenspiel is missing the sharp notes in order so save the parents from the noise, not the toddler :D

I’m lucky my mom was one of those “Beethoven playing through a speaker next to the womb” types from the get-go. It just seems like a missed opportunity to waste formative years listening to piss poor examples of music.

I'm non-English and I hadn't heard the word "Dalmatian" pronounced before I watched this video. So thank you for making me constantly say it incorrectly!

My parents never bothered to expose me to any sort of childrens music. I listened to The Who, Earth, Wind and Fire, Michael Jackson, Uraiah Heep and Alan Parsons Project from day one and even in kindergarden, I hated childrens music, knowing that music can be so much more. Now that I've got a doughter of my own, I already set the tracks: A wholesome mix of various Metal subgenres (Heavy Rock up to technical Deathcore), classical folk and Dark Drum'n'Bass. Up till now, she isn't bothered the least, even if I go full deathgrowl mode on her. She only giggles at daddy's silly noises :D

Oh it's not just music. Using software to teach normally-developing children about language is nonsense if you can have a real human being reading or conversing with them in stead - and yet there's tons of "educational" software that claims all kinds of wonderful effects on language learning. It's like how Nestlé markets powdered breast milk substitute as better than the real thing.

First I found your video on Sibelius' interface and loved that because I'm a software developer that actually cares about creating usable UI and it drives me crazy when others, often companies with relatively unlimited resources, don't. I was hoping for more videos on interfaces of other programs, so took a look at your videos and oh... they're generally about music, but hey I have an interest (though basic knowledge and zero skill) in music theory, let's try. Watched your video on Hallelujah and agreed with and loved that. Then I saw this and agreed with and loved this. 3 out of 3 with great production and highly entertaining, that's a subscribe from me!

Here have a like!

Thanks, I'll start teaching my kids calculus a decade early.

LMAO THE PLATE

I'm currently in Uni studying music, and although most people are pretty shocked I'm a musician and my mum is Deaf I think it helped a lot in this early stage. We had a piano, and my grandparents had gotten me a few other instruments since I seemed to like them so much, including a mini guitar (not ukelele everyone always called it a ukelele it's 6 strings tuned like a guitar) and a mini accordion, and I had basically free reign of all of those instruments during my free time. Because my mum was Deaf I had no limits on what type of sounds I made, I think a large amount of the disdain for dissonance isn't for the babies' sake, it's for the parents. Adults don't want to hear minor seconds being smashed on a piano in quick succession with off key wailing. But if we think about how babies learn speech, they don't do things "right" the first time, they have to develop an understanding of what they are capable of.

In the late 1980's, I heard my toddler stomping around the apartment singing "Bankrobber" by The Clash. I was flushed with pride.

I remember being 5 years old with my aunt showing me how to play Frère Jacques on the piano, but not before sternly telling me to keep off the black keys. Which made me only want to use the black keys more.

1:31: as a classical percussionist, extremely grateful you didn’t say “xylophone”

Damn i wish my parents knew more about music than “radio song good”. Both are my grandfathers were musicians, but both of my parents didn’t care about it at all

I was in a store which sells these crappy children music toys and I was impressed that I couldn't actually play on them because they sounded so wrong :D Like you could hear that I was playing "The imperial March", but it was so distored that it threw my Rythm totally out of whack. But I got a look from an adult saying: "Dafuq?", so I consider this a Success.

Hey, those cheap beeping toys aren't worthless! You can circuit bend them.

there's a simple fix to this, let your baby listen to different types of music, like my parents let me listen to gregorian chanting, country, folk, rock, rap, and rockabilly, and today i love all types of music.

I've been trying to convince my friends to get their kid to listen to proper music in the car. Not so that the kid becomes a musical genius, but just so we don't have to listen to shit music on repeat for the next eight years.

5:42 Oh my god this man has given his child perfect pitch

According to my mother, the thing that would calm me when I was a baby was the music of J.S. Bach. By contrast, I hated her singing lullabies. Have you considered making some musical instruments for your twins, or buying something inexpensive but which still allows for a good deal of flexibility of sound production and which allows the children to explore musical concepts?

When I was a toddler my uncle was in his high school. We were given a small 4 octaves keyboard I think and my brother played it until it broke. My father fix it and it broke again after 3 years. Now my brother has perfect pitch.

Growing up as a kid, my parents put Led Zeppelin, Gorillaz, Pink Floyd and so on sometimes and the music videos scared me. Now Pink Floyd is my favourite band. So I totally agree.

I highly recommend Pocoyo videos for kids development. The character design, animation, color, music, story and narration are all on point! For younger kids under 1 years old, Notekins is a great introduction to musical note, dynamic, and instruments. If you are really brave in facing the risk of having a repetitive children song plays all day in your house, try Baby Shark :D

"No matter how much you quack quack, daddy ducks are never coming back back."

I find this video interesting cus I remember my parents playing me a lot of “experimental” music along with the usual childrens songs. My mom is big on classical, but along with the usual Mozart’s and Telemann’s she also played recordings of The Rite Of Spring and I believe a few Toshiro Mayuzumi compositions like the Nirvana symphony. Apparently I didn’t really shriek in terror towards musical dissonance as a kid so that really helps your argument.

While it’s true that we don’t start babies with garbled speech, we do baby-talk to them a lot, and apparently that does have some benefits. Probably because the sounds are exaggerated which is a great way of teaching them the aspects of their mother tongue’s phonology that are important.

This vid made me pretty proud of my mother. As far back as I can remember she had me listening to baroque classical and Latin operas.

I have to confess that I actually like that rogue relative minor chord...

2:52 Accidental grime music

Ah, yes! Great video, this needs to be pointed out more. All this obsession with simplicity and a bottom-up approach is completely contrary to updated learning theory and how children learn every single other skill in life. I wonder if it's a consequence of the garbage educational system many parts of the western world have had for so long. I think people misunderstand the purpose of nursery rhymes and lullaby's. Most are adaptations of folk songs, which are easily passed on, easily playable on many different instruments, and easy to sing (the melodies generally are, anyway, there's some crazy folk music out there). Especially considering most were written in the years prior to recorded music, their purpose is not to gradually ease a child into music and "make them smarter", the purpose was to preserve local/cultural/generational melodies and make music easily accessible to common folk. Lullaby's are again, simple and relatively memorable melodies that are easy for a non-musically trained parent to sing to a child on a regular basis as a source of comfort or for family unity, entertainment, for ease of participation of younger children, etc. All of these purposes are still perfectly valid, but being played through a chunk of plastic isn't going to make a child smarter. "Lord knows dissonance is bad for babies" Hahaha, too true. We're so brainwashed by radio pop to be averted to anything *remotely* dissonant. Have a listen to Turkish or Hungarian pop or folk music.

“No matter how much you quack quack, daddy duck's never coming back back.” Scarily true for some children affected by this.

ALSO ONE THING BABY TOYS ARE ALL LABELED AS “ZYLOPHONES” WHEN THEY ARE ACTUALLY GLOCKENSPIELS WHY

Hey, I got my one year old niece a child's xylophone with no sharp/flat keys. It is set at an angle and has a hole at the top where you can put a ball so that it rolls across the keys and plays the scale. And it is cute as hell. Great video as always. Also: that horse gallop sound from the keyboard sounds like a burst fire rifle, not a horse lol

"Just give em' Wii Music, they'll be fine" -Fat Lazy Penguin

2:50 _musical beeping_ _cat-ish sound_ *_gunshots_* _musical beeping_ *_more gunshots_*

no joke i had this on in the background while studying for my essay on child language acquisition tomorrow and 3:10 has convinced me youtube is watching

This shouldn't only apply to your children when it comes to music. Think about all aspects of media and entertainment as an opportunity for furthering their intelligence, be picky about all of it and make sure it all has artistic integrity and nuance. Culture your kids from an early age. Pains me to think about what kind of brain rot is happening from the garbage animation in those Videogyan clips and what level of incompetence it took to make in the first place. There's a lot of this kinda terrible stuff in children's entertainment. D:

One of the best channels on youtube, keep it up man. FOR DEM TWIN BOIS

Yet we all can agree on something... We all hate those nursery rhymes channels.

Decades later, I'm still trying to make sense of everything going on around me.

Super insightful and cool to think about. This and your Hallelujah video gave me hope for the world lmao, we need more intelligent musical perspectives on the interwebs so please keep up the good work !!

Some Music channels: Hey guys, today I'll teach you the basics of Trumpet playing. Tantacrul: Hello yes I'll explain why having good nursery rhymes are good for your kids, don't question or I eat your liver.

As I've grown older I've realized A: how often people underestimated my and my peer's intelligence as children to a degree that made some of us undervalue it and underdevelop it (except my own parents and some others, bless 'em) and B: how crazy smart pretty much ALL children are.

OMG somebody finally agrees with me! I've been saying what was said in this video for years! I've also heard, I think from an Oliver Saks documentary, that research has shown that kids develop a lifelong taste for whatever music they heard most before the age of nine. So if you want your kid to be musical and to like good stuff, you have to play it in your home on a good stereo system, which many people don't do anymore. A lot of people use crappy terrible sounding little speakers with the volume turned way down and they wonder why their kids hate things like classical music. And for the love of god, give them access to real musical instruments, so they can know early enough, if they have talent and want to pursue it. You don't want your kid to buy a violin on a whim at 30, be able to play it immediately without lessons and realize, "oh shit I probably could've been a child prodigy and been in the New York Phil by now if I started at 5." It happens. I think Americans are overall becoming less musical for these reasons and also the fact that music education/appreciation is being taken out of schools. Maybe you might not think that's a big deal, but there's a lot of naturally talented, passionate musicians, for whom music is the only thing they could ever be good at. This sort of nonsense is taking away jobs that they desperately need because of the decreasing demand.

I started doodling around with instruments propably as soon as I was able to hold my head. My oldest memories are always in regard to music. My niece, 2 years, will get her first keyboard this christmas.

THAT PLATE. THAT IS COMEDY GOLD. I have a daughter. She is now 23months old. Cameo ; White Stripes ; Jet ; Queen ; Cake ; The Hooters ; Gnarls Barkley ; Devo ; System of a Down ; Church of the Cosmic Skull ; Ghost ; Ben Caplan And every night since day 1 - Riven, Myst, Myst III, Myst IV, Diary of Edith Finch ; Obduction ; Myst V. On a loop. Recently she started requesting it on even before she goes to sleep. Shame she didn't take a liking do Debussey in her early months. But she does enjoy Elisabethan chamber music and folk in general. She also enjoys crap-pop, but you can't win them all.

did anyone else notice at 1:12 that Shostakovich is just hanging there on the wall

6:22 "let's start with a minor" Epic

Babies are like sponges. Show them to advanced stuff then teach them the basic parts. It keeps them curious and familiar when the time comes. I learned English that way, I just started to watch anime with English subs when I was 12. I was watching Death Note(For people don't know it a very difficult anime to understand without proper understanding in language) and absolutely didn't understand most of the anime but I somewhat learned both English and Japanese after watching a bunch of animes. So challenges are good for brain and helps you learn quicker

6:39 "peace was never an option"

One time I was taking care of my baby nephew and I put the song “Trio” by King Crimson on the tv, which is really nice sounding even though it’s a live recording of an improvisation, and went upstairs to go get something. Since that track is pretty short, it ended faster than I thought it would and it autoplayed Larks Tongues In Aspic Part 2, which is very much not nice sounding. I had to sprint down the stairs before the drums and bass kicked in.

2:43 that part actually made me laugh out loud

apparently, my mom played all kinds of music when i was in the womb and even after i was born, and now i have synesthesia and i'm a kpop stan so i don't know how well that turned out

brilliant... the parallels between language acquisition and music are so often overlooked, and the pandering of oversimplified musical content to small children by creators/parents with their own fear of music

When I was growing up, my dad was singing in clubs and would practice at home regularly since before I can remember. At age 3, my favourite record that dad owned was Jean-Michel Jarre's Rendez-Vous. And when I was 5, I was left alone with dad's big stereo one night while the adults were all distracted having a barbeque cookout and I found the Classical Music radio station and listened to Mahler's first Symphony all the way through, which stuck with me and was one of the main reasons I decided that the Trumpet was the instrument for me.

7:04... I almost had a flashback to the Sibelius video