By Alex Nunez on February 16, 2010 in
As you've probably heard, there's plenty of research to suggest that playing music for children while they're still in the womb is a good thing. Some say that just as children remember their mother's voice from when they were still a bun in the oven, they similarly recognize the music their moms played for them during the same period. Now, the "easiest" way to do this is for a woman to use headphones placed on her belly. But while that's the simplest approach, it certainly may not be the most pleasant. Expectant moms now have a better option, however. They're called BellyBuds, and we just got a demonstration of them here at Toy Fair 2010 in New York.
Bellybuds came about when Curtis Williams's wife complained that playing music for her growing baby by placing headphones on her belly was very uncomfortable. Williams figured that someone must have come up with a solution for this, but at the time, no one had. So he came up with the idea of headphones designed specifically for playing pre-natal music.
The BellyBuds, as you can see in the above photo, adhere directly to the mother's skin via a removable adhesive ring that clicks onto the headphones themselves. The adhesive is soft and jelly-like, leaves no residue and comes off painlessly. Curtis had us place a bud on our hands to see how it felt. Once the adhesive wears out, replacement rings can be purchased for around $6 a pair.
Soft, pliable covers keep the music being played from being heard on the outside. This way, a woman could use the buds at work, for example, without disturbing her colleagues. Removing the covers exposes speaker openings and allows mom to simultaneously enjoy the music she's playing for the baby in her belly. Williams plans to offer different replacement covers as optional accessories, including fun themes such as oven temperature dials.
So, do the buds work? Yes, quite well, in fact. With a bud stuck to the palm of our hand, Williams connected his iPod and started playing some music by The Beatles. He instructed us to hold the back of our hand to our ear, so that the music would fire through our palm, generally simulating what the sound would be like to a gestating baby. The audio was only slightly muffled, and the music came through clearly enough that we could even make out the song lyrics.
That detail is important, as Williams says he has a number of customers who are military wives with husbands deployed overseas. They've found that the BellyBuds are a great way to play back MP3 recorded messages from the men, allowing the unborn children to be exposed to their fathers' voices, even though the dads themselves are unable to be there in person. Grandparents are also recording messages like this, he says.
A complete starter kit retails for around $50, and includes everything a pregnant woman would need to begin playing pre-natal music, except for the media player itself. For additional information on other, standard types of headphones, check out our most recent full report.