Parents of all cultures try to calm their babies by talking as if they were singing.

To be a baby is to be in danger of death or, at least, it has been almost always.

Despite advances in medicine, its unequal implementation still means that more than five million children under the age of five still die every year, mainly in the countries of central Africa.

In the developed world, babies are no longer so threatened, but with the inertia of millions of years of evolution they continue to scream for their lives in a way that is impossible to ignore.

To calm them, in addition to doing everything possible to find and neutralize the sources of their discomfort, parents sing lullabies and make all kinds of sounds in the hope that they will calm a being they sometimes hate as much as they love.

And it seems that they do it in a similar way in all cultures.

That is the conclusion of an international team of scientists led by Courtney Hilton,

.

The authors raised the possibility that the way in which adults change their expression when addressing a baby had similarities to the sounds that many animals make to communicate with each other.

Meerkats give warning cries to warn that a predator is nearby and make specific sounds to coordinate when hunting.

Many other species make sounds with specific functions that would have arisen because they gave evolutionary advantages.

Some studies had already shown that lullabies or the sounds that parents direct to their children when they complain have a calming effect and some similarities between different cultures had already been seen, but the team that today publishes the work in

, put those resemblances to the test.

To do this, he collected 1,615 recordings of expressions and songs that 21 societies from six continents use with babies.

Later, he used computer systems to analyze differences and similarities between the expressions and songs used with children and between adults.

According to Hilton, “Although songs, language or ways of raising children are very different between different cultures, when it comes to calming a screaming baby, the older ones change the way they vocalize and the tone they use in a different way. similar and intelligible between societies”.

This, the authors of the work interpret, "would support the hypothesis that the form of vocalizations directed at children is due to their function, in a similar way to the vocal signals of other animal species."

The authors also played the recordings of parents calming their children to 51,065 people from 187 countries.

Despite cultural differences and different languages,

Although, as the authors acknowledge, the way of addressing children is far from homogeneous, there are many common features that, in short, made the speech dedicated to babies more musical.

In general, the tone tends to be higher and the variations in that tone greater.

In addition, the vowels are exaggerated more and a purer vocal timbre is used, which contrasts with the screams of the children.

In an exercise in humor uncommon in scientific articles, the authors remind us, "for readers unfamiliar with babies, that their cries are acoustically harsh."

As the Stanford University (USA) researcher Anne Fernald indicated in a text cited by the authors, "the communicative force of parental vocalizations does not derive from their arbitrary meaning within a linguistic code, but rather from their immediate musical power to excite and alert, to calm and to delight”.

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