Premature Babies' Pain Reduced by Music.

When Mark Tramo's daughter Cadence was born three weeks prematurely, doctors inserted a feeding tube. But Tramo wanted to see if she would eat if he fed her himself.

"I arrived on the scene around three in the morning and I said 'No, no, no. I'll try and feed Cadence,'" he told Nightline. "So I kind of palmed her and held her in my hand. And started feeding her and like a lot of songs you write it just comes to you. So I started singing 'Bright, bright world, clear, clear day, I'm a little baby drinking.'"

Cadence responded to her father's music, and she did not need to use a feeding tube again.

Most parents would keep this story as a beautiful memory, but Tramo can apply it to his work. He is a professor of neurology at Harvard Medical Schoolas well as a musician and a songwriterwho studies the effect of music on the human brain.

"Music is in our genes," says Tramo told the Harvard Gazette. "Many researchers like myself are trying to understand melody, harmony, rhythm, and the feelings they produce, at the level of individual brain cells. At this level, there may be a universal set of rules that governs how a limited number of sounds can be combined in an infinite number of ways."

His experience with his daughter is consistent with another experiment he conducted at Massachusetts General Hospital for Children to determine if lullabies could reduce the pain of medical procedures in newborns.

Blood is routinely drawn from babies through their heels, which is very ...