A fantastic new product: a speaker in vagina allows your fetus to hear unmuffled Mozart

January 5, 2016 • 10:30 am

Whether prenatal exposure to music really helps babies develop faster is controversial, but that hasn’t stopped pregnant women from buying all kinds of devices to expose their fetuses to music—usually classical. (This is based on the equally controversial and dubious “Mozart Effect“, the claim that cognition in children and adults is improved–short term–by listening to classical music.) Previously, the prenatal musical speakers were strapped to the belly, like this one:

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But of course how well can your fetus really hear Mozart when those glorious notes have to penetrate all of the abdomenal skin, tissue, fat, and uterine wall? Can such the fetus distinguish between J. S. Bach and P. D. Q. Bach, or between Mozart and Aerosmith? That’s crucial.

Never fear! As reported in the Guardian, you can bypass a lot of that annoying and muffling tissue by sticking the speaker right into the vagina! And a Spanish company, Babypod, has just the ticket: a vaginal speaker system that costs only US$132.85. Here’s the item and how you use it:

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Look at how that sound gets right up to the baby’s ears, and how the baby is smiling as it hears The Magic Flute! Of course it may play hob with your urination, not to mention your sex life, but you use it for only a short time:

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On its webpage, Babypod claims that it’s “the only device that has been demonstrated to stimulate the vocalization of babies before birth with music.” I wasn’t aware that babies could even vocalize before birth, being in liquid and all, but what do I know?

The Guardian gives more details (my emphasis):

The pale pink device, which costs 150 euros (£110), is controlled by a phone app but does not use Bluetooth. Parents-to-be can share their babies’ listening experience using split headphones which hang out of the vagina.

The Babypod, which has a top sound level of 54 decibels, is recommended for use from the 16th week of pregnancy, and for between 10-20 minutes a time – or around half the length of the average Joanna Newsom song.

Babypod was launched at the “first concert for foetuses ever held in the world” in which Soraya Arnelas, who finished 23rd in the 2009 Eurovision song contest, “serenaded” 10 pregnant women fitted with the speakers, singing Christmas carols.

Babypod reassures customers that the vibrations of the device do not adversely affect a foetus – “this is why sex toys are allowed in pregnancy”.

And here’s that Fetal Concert; apparently the singer’s music was transmitted directly into the vaginas of the audience. As she said, “I’ve never performed for such a young audience.”

I’m not sure I want to live in this world any more. . .

h/t: Grania

94 thoughts on “A fantastic new product: a speaker in vagina allows your fetus to hear unmuffled Mozart”

      1. p. s. search this on YouTube at your peril. Absolutely NSFW (until a couple of minutes ago I had believed Ms Sticky to be fictional. All too real)

    2. This is an absolutely true story.

      My daughter & her twin brother were born 8 weeks premature and had terrible acid reflux (valve not fully online yet). Getting them to go to sleep was very difficult. We tried everything, including music. We would stand in front of our stereo speakers rocking them in our arms while playing classical music. It worked pretty well for my son, but not my daughter.

      I decided to try other types of music. The first song that did the trick was Bulls On Parade by Rage Against The Machine. She was asleep before the song was half over. Thinking it was likely mere chance I continued to use similar hard music as a lullaby for her, including Black Sabbath, and it worked consistently! Faeries Wear Boots and Iron Man are still favorites of hers to this day.

      1. My respects to your daughter!

        I was going to query whether Mozart was necessarily the best thing to play. I was even going to say “Why not hard rock?” But your story beat me to it.

        cr

        1. When she was slightly older, just starting to walk and talk, she again showed her innate hard rock nature. I was in the kitchen cooking while enjoying a drink and some music. I’m not sure if I remember correctly, but I seem to remember it was Metallica that was playing. She teetered into the living area with a toy grasped in her hand and sat to listen to the music. Intrigued, I stopped what I was doing to watch her listening to the music.

          Subtly, so that I wasn’t sure at first, and then more definitely, in perfect time, she started doing the classic hard rock head banging motion. I snorted a mouthful of nice Belgian Abbey ale all over the kitchen counter. She definitely had never seen anyone doing that before, it just came to her naturally!

        1. Wow. That is one heck of a trio. I never knew that those three had gotten together for an album. Thanks for the lead.

  5. “I’m not sure I want to live in this world any more. . .”

    But what if it was used to play back the sounds of purring cats?

      2. LOL – where’s Ben when we need him?

        PS – had to look up “play hob.” Never heard the exp’n before.

    2. Purring kittehs? About the right frequency I think… turn the bass up to max and you’ve got a vibrator!

      😉

      cr

  6. Id 20 minutes at 54 decibels is good then of course 120 decibels for 40 minutes must be twice as effective!

    Lemmy, RIP

    1. I am trying to imagine what Lemmy would have made of this idea. Hopefully an EXTREMELY rude video.
      Ozzy Osbourne might try to bitr the [something] off.

    2. Babies born deaf! That would be fun. BTW… when *does* the kid develop functioning ears? And when does s/he learn that appreciation part?

  7. Perhaps this particular form of woo should be forwarded to the FDA for comment.

    As for sex toys being allowed during pregnancy, well, I am just not sure what to say that would be acceptable in public.

    1. Who gets to decide what would be acceptable in public?
      This calls for the obligatory link to the Baby Jesus Butt Plug. One is coming to a pew seat beside you.

        2. Sorry, having worked to make a pun out of Tim White (for which I apologise), I now can’t clear my mind of the image of a Bible bound in Thumper skin.
          What to do with a Bible thumper and a “Baby Jesus Butt Plug”? If I’m allowed duct tape, I’d just insert it (used) as a dummy-tit. Otherwise, I’d ram the point home with a radish.

  8. I dunno, from the diagram it looks like there is a second orifice into which this device might go which provides a better location.

        1. So that’s what the priests are doing wrong – going for the treble end of the choir not the bass.

    1. Heck, it wasn’t even bunked to begin with. The original finding was, at best, suggestive. But such are pop cultural epidemics that a myth can run laps around the world, settle down, have kids, found a nation, and build a giant fortress around itself even when the truth has got its boots on.

  10. Wealthy new mothers and mothers to be are fertile ground (pardon the pun) for hucksters. We’re on a 200+ member “mom’s club” email list, and there’s a lot of woo and entirely unnecessary contraptions that get shared around. A lot of anger, too, if you dare challenge it. Try telling a bunch of mom’s that their $100 natural baltic amber teething necklace does nothing, and see what happens.

    1. Anyone who has forked out real money for a woo remedy gets downright unfriendly if you point them in the direction of debunking material.
      Not surprisingly, no-one wants to be taken for a fool.

      Unfortunately, there is nothing like the middle-class when it comes to being gullible patsies for the alt med industry.

      1. I think it’s a double whammy bias. There’s pointing out they got conned, something nobody likes to hear. But also IMO people don’t like to feel helpless or out of control. They don’t like to be told there’s nothing much they can do. They’d rather waste money doing something which has some remote possibility of helping, than do nothing.

        Now there’s lots of basic things expectant mothers can do. Staying healthy being the big one. But most are on the lookout for that something more they can do…and there is always a salesperson in the wings, willing to tell them they can do more/be a better mother for the low low price of $19.99 (or whatever). These sorts of product feed into that desire to do more.

        My last thought (maybe this makes it a triple whammy); I’ve seen a fair amount of one-upmanship and the motherly equivalent of dick-measuring go on in these groups. IMO sometimes these products become popular simply because each mother wants to be seen by her peer group as being the best, the ‘most extreme’ in terms of motherly effort. The mother who spends $100 to stick a speaker up her vagina clearly cares more for her baby’s welfare than one who doesn’t bother going to that length, right?

  11. Hooray! Now we can start to damage our babies’ hearing long before they are born! Thanks Obama!

    1. Try reading the post again. No one named ‘Obama’ had anything to do with the production or sale of this device.

      1. I do not know who anoNY is but I laughed at the comment, assuming (perhaps wrongly) that the comment was meant as satire due to the propensity of our American right wing-nuts to blame everything on Obama. If he/she was not trying to be funny, the I am at a loss for words…..

      2. Obama hasn’t sent in the B-52s (err, the bomb-dropping killy things, not the “Love Shack” version) to turn the factory and surrounding city into a smoking hole in the ground. Therefore, it’s Obama’s fault.
        It’s also Obama’s fault that there are Oregon (-ish) gun nuts revving up for a massacre over a court case originating in the late 1990s.

          1. A bomb-bay full of bouffants. Now there’s an idea.
            Did anyone get a description of those mushrooms?

  12. …never mind the flashlight, help me find my car keys and we’ll drive out.

    Okay, but one question: Why do I keep hearing Mozart?

  14. If you could end up with a Joey Alexander at 11 or 12 years old, I don’t think you could manufacture them fast enough.

  16. Without even knowing the material that the speaker is made out of, the holes alone suggest that cleaning it will be difficult, if not impossible. I’m not sure I want a tiny, vagina sized speaker that’s full of secretions and whatever critters happened to get caught inside.

  17. Absorption of sound in water is negligible over distances of a meter. Dispersion and scattering might introduce some interesting distortions, but most people would be able to discern the music they are listening to quite easily, assuming they were already familiar with it.

    This reminds me of the ice crystal formation being bombarded with different music.

    http://www.masaru-emoto.net/english/water-crystal.html

    2. I am very skeptical about your claim. Absorption in water is indeed negligible, but you are missing a key component of wave propagation: interfaces. Air-water interface is not that transmissive for speech/music frequencies. Think of swimming in a pool, and dunking your head: you won’t be able to hear much of the external world.

      This is the reason why ultrasound probes/transducers are kept in contact with the skin using gels during ultrasound scans: so that the acoustic waves (sonar) don’t encounter the air-fluid interface.

    1. No! Baby gotta do it’s part to be an early SuperKid. Thanks to the Personhood movement, it’s already a real baby! None of this early slacking off / development period!

    1. I’m having the mental image of a clickbait headline of “Pre-natal suicide trend follows introduction of vaginal speakers”.

  22. I bet it sells like crazy.

    I don’t understand why people think there are prenatal gimmicks that can teach their child to speak earlier, have a higher IQ, or offer other enhancements. I suspect it is really just an effort to make your precious snowflake just a little bit better than everyone else’s.

  23. I am deeply offended by the cultural and patriarchic hegemony of all this. Helpless women are being indoctrinated by Gaia-raping greedy capitalists to impose yet another dead white European male on our children. Where are the whale songs, the sounds of the rain forest, the Bolivian pan flutes, the noble quzheng?

    Good grief.

    1. Well, there’s always Christmas carols sung by Soraya Arnelas, who – and I quote – finished 23rd in the 2009 Eurovision Song Contest.

      Some things are beyond satire.

      cr

  28. “This practice of playing Mozart during pregnancy so the fetus could hear it. It was supposed to increase intelligence. Didn’t work. All it did was sell a lot of CDs and piss off a lot of fetuses.”

  29. Oh I have so much to say about this!

    Of all the things a woman’s vagina needs, I’m pretty sure a speaker isn’t one of them and you have to have earphones that dangle out too? I don’t mean to be gross, but what about vaginal secretions? Of course, it would be funny to have a bluetooth speaker that accidentally became a speaker phone for phone calls – and you think it’s embarrassing if someone calls you when you’re in the loo!

    You can bet someone is going to get those things logged up too high & need to go to the emergency to get them fished out too.

        1. My ex ( a family physician) had to remove a pizza cutter from a woman once (blade side out). She was trying to protect herself from the devil….3 AM in ER. She was sent to the psych ward.

  30. How long before someone decides to create an anal speaker device to help “stimulate via sound waves the process of defecation and ease constipation”? What would be some ideal tunes for such a product?

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