Certified Organic Music

While all around us we see a drive to the natural and the organic, in the area of musical culture we see a trend to the artificial. Lullabyes and nursery rhymes are a fundmental part of our muscical culture, however what we see today is that electronic toys and their synthesised sounds are literally driving out the parent’s voice.

Ironically these toys are being promoted as educational. The value of training the young ear with good quality sounds can never be overestimated. A baby’s ear is at its most sensitive stage while it is developing speech and learning to recognise different sounds. This is the time that they should be exposed to good quality, well played, in tune music. In fact, this exposure should take place during pregnancy.  Sadly this is the time that babies are most exposed to artifically produced sounds. The synthetic sounds from a toy, synthetic nursery rhyme tunes and sometimes even synthetically produced human voices.

Flat batteries and the inevitable wet and wild use that babies subject these toys to result in even the best quality toys quickly being reduced to out of tune horrors.

Other sources of poor ear training are synthetic instrumental sounds and badly recorded or played music.  The prevalent idea appears to be that if music is recorded for children, quality is not an issue. Recorded music for childen should be of the highest quality, as this is the music that is forming their ear. Just as poor quality food affects the development of the child more than the adult, poor quality music affects the intellectual and aesthetic development of the child more than it affects the adult. If you can’t stand a noisy toy it is a good sign that your child shouldn’t be listening to it. It is a fallacy that children enjoy noise.

One of the greatest gifts you can give your baby is to sing to him/her regularly, play good quality music on real instruments, or well recorded, well played classical music, whether live or on compact discs, as opposed to out of tune synthetic sounds. This will assist the child in developing a good musical ear. 

Naxos have recently released a series of “My First” albums. These include "My First Lullaby Album", "My First Classical Music Album" and "My First Mozart Album". 


"My First Piano Album" and "My First Violin Album" may be of interest for children learning these instruments.


These are all available for download from Classics On-line.  Tracks can be purchased individually to allow you to make your own compilation.


By Colourstrings South Africa