Fetal and Early Childhood Hearing Development

Even in a four-month-old fetus, the hearing system is fully developed and has already reached its final size. From this point on, the child has its first auditory experiences in the womb. It associates individual tones or sounds with specific emotions, such as the mother's voice. The mother's moods, feelings of stress, and happiness are transmitted directly to the embryo via hormones, and the child already learns the dependence of accompanying sounds and nuances of the mother's voice and mood. Over the course of the first years of life, the child eventually develops further auditory patterns of a completely different nature, which increasingly enable it to orient itself in its environment.

Our later ability for spatial hearing and highly differentiated perception of acoustic events is ultimately a consequence of this developmental process and forms the prerequisite for the ability to derive authentic sensory perception from an artificial head recording. The acoustic spatial experience is, analogous to a hologram, the experience-based representation of reality that is only assembled in the brain.

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