American Idol winner Abi Carter wowed the crowd Sunday night, with the 21-year-old taking home the Season 22 victory. In a follow-up interview on Live with Kelly and Mark, Carter told hosts Kelly Ripa and Mark Consuelos that she’s been musical since before she was born, as her mother listened in during an ultrasound appointment and heard her ‘singing’ in the womb.
“I’d never heard of this before this segment, but you actually were humming in utero?” Ripa asked Carter.
“Fun fact,” Carter explained. “When my mom was pregnant with me she went in for an ultrasound. And the doctor was listening for a heartbeat and he takes off his headphones and puts them down and says, ‘Andrea, you need to listen to this. I don’t even know what I’m hearing, it sounds like whale sounds — she’s singing in your stomach,'” Carter said. “I looked it up recently and it’s a thing — sometimes babies will sing in their mom’s stomach.”
“My mom is a singer herself,” the American Idol winner went on. “So I was always listening to her sing from the womb.”
This extraordinary phenomenon is just one of the many signs that preborn children are living, growing beings in their mother’s wombs. The child is developing at a remarkable rate as she goes from a mere cell to a complex human child throughout the nine-month gestation. Live Action’s “Meet Baby Olivia” video gives a sneak peek at this process.
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As the Endowment for Human Development notes, beginning at 18 weeks, the child’s speaking movements begin in her larynx, or voice box. By 20 weeks gestation, her sense of hearing begins to function, which means she can hear her mother singing to her. In fact, these movements may begin even earlier; a 2016 study led by Dr Marisa Lopez-Teijon of the Institut Marques in Barcelona showed babies “singing” to orchestral music as early as 16 weeks.
“On hearing music, the fetus (sic) responds with movements similar to vocalization, which is the step prior to singing and speaking,” the study authors wrote.
As Carter’s story shows, responding to music and learning to sing are traits that begin before a child is even born.
