The Womb Effect - Life Inside the Womb

Imagine you spent the next nine months in a zero-gravity comfort chair made of water (amniotic fluid), that you were continuously fed the best and most nutritious food, and the only sound you heard was a smooth, comforting, muted low-frequency vibratory sound, accompanied by the steady pulse of a mother's heartbeat.

During this long gestation period, you would become quite used to this environment and very relaxed. But at the moment of birth, you would immediately be bombarded with a shocking, new environment that was noisy, chaotic, bright, loud, and quite physically uncomfortable.

The transition between "pre"-natal and "post"-natal can be a nightmare for a newborn. The infant is pummeled with new sounds they've never heard before, and in fact, sound annoying and aggressive. The effect might be compared to wearing earplugs while attending a loud rock concert, and then halfway through the show, pulling the earplugs out. The 'shrillness' of the 'new' sound can be startling.

What Does the Womb Sound Like?

The sounds and noises that we all live with in our daily lives are distracting and even frightening to a newborn baby. Why? Because those sounds never existed inside the 'safe chamber' of the womb. The sound world of the pre-born is one of internal/maternal low frequency, rumble, vibrations, and a muted quality of sounds emanating from the world outside the mother. In fact, every one of the other products promoted as "baby sleep aids" or "baby sleep music", while appealing to parents, contains audio content that is completely foreign to an infant's ears.

Popular research indicates that an infant's hearing range is not fully developed. The research, however, does not take into account what the baby feels. Low frequency is mostly felt, not heard. Inside the safety of the womb, the baby hears predominantly low frequency sounds, and nearly nothing else.

Consider the images below:

Fig 1: Sound outside the womb

Fig 1a: Sound inside the womb

Fig. 1 shows the frequency analysis of normal sound as we hear it on a daily basis, while Fig. 1a shows the same sampling of normal sound, but as heard from inside the womb.

The sound inside the womb is calming and comforting. In a word: safe. That sound is relatively loud, and is comprised of a mother's heartbeat and the sound of blood and fluid movement.