Estimated read time: 2-3 minutes
This archived news story is available only for your personal, non-commercial use. Information in the story may be outdated or superseded by additional information. Reading or replaying the story in its archived form does not constitute a republication of the story.
Who says heavy metal can't put your kids to sleep? A company that produces lullaby albums is getting more and more popular. But they're not your usual lullabies.
Your baby has trouble sleeping. A nice soothing lullaby should calm him or her down. So you turn on some AC/DC, Metallica or U2.
Of course I'm not talking about the regular versions of these songs.
Dr. Ross Flom, an associate professor of psychology at BYU, said, "Obviously they've stripped away the lyrics. We wouldn't want our young infants hearing [the original version of] ‘Enter Sandman' by Metallica."
Yeah, when kids get older, lyrics like "It's just the beast under your bed…" may freak them out.
The lullabies are part of the Rockabye Baby series from the CMH Label Group in L.A. It has release 23 lullaby cover albums featuring groups like Coldplay, The Beach Boys, Nirvana, Radiohead, No Doubt and Bjork.
To get some insight into these lullabies, I spoke to Dr. Flom, who authored a recent study showing babies can distinguish between happy music and sad music.
"They don't necessarily know it as ‘happy' or know it as ‘sad,' but they know that ‘this' sounds different than ‘that,'" he said.
He says babies will react to these songs like they do any lullaby, but he feels these songs are probably meant for parents to enjoy.
"You're not likely to play music to your child, or a video or whatever or interact with your child with a game if you don't like it yourself. If you find it annoying and grating, you're probably not going to engage your child with it," he said.
As a music fan, Flom says he had a little trouble recognizing some of the music after it had been, for lack of a better word, "lullabyzed." I just made up that word.
"It was hard for me to even recognize ‘Paint it Black' by The Rolling Stones as such, even though I knew the title [and] that it was ‘Paint it Black,'" he said.
Me, personally, I had trouble recognizing part of "Thunderstruck" from AC/DC. But other songs, you should probably recognize right away. For example, "You Shook Me All Night Long" by AC/DC and "One" by Metallica were spot-on matches.
The company has plans to release albums featuring songs by Black Sabbath, Queen and even Kanye West.
E-mail: pnelson@ksl.com
