Music and voice interventions in the NICU: a novel adaptive personalized auditory care based on biophysical feedback

Neonatal Intensive Care Units are an extremely noisy and stressful environment, known to be deleterious to the neurological condition of preterm born infants. In a time when the sensory environment is critical for the infants’ development, implementing new acoustic solutions relying on evidence-based research is key for offsetting these risks. Music and voice interventions have shown beneficial effects on preterm infants’ brain, behavior, and physiological development, increasing our understanding of the effects and mechanisms of acoustic interventions for wellbeing. Newborns can distinguish between vocal and instrumental melodies, and music intervention creates musical memories and influences the resting state of preterm infants. Maternal voice interventions stabilize the newborns, promote the maturation of their autonomous nervous system, and protect them from pain by increasing oxytocin levels. Structured and meaningful acoustic interventions can improve the bioecological niche where preterm infants mature in the first weeks of life, traditionally an acoustically unpredictable and noisy environment. Based on these results, future research aims at collecting, analyzing, and interpreting data from the infant’s physiology and well-being in order to provide each hospitalized newborn with a personalized and individually modulated sound environment that will be tailored to his/her needs, and potential health perspectives.