from The Guardian

Sonic youth: vaginal speaker lets you play tunes to foetuses

babypod speakersHit me baby one more time: The Babypod opens up so many possibilities … Photograph: Babypod

Does anybody else remember when a Donny Osmond poster was found up a woman’s vagina? Because I do. I’ve never forgotten it, and I never will.

Now, there’s another means of smuggling Osmond into one’s insides – a vaginal speaker. Spanish company Babypod has invented a speaker that is designed to be inserted into the vagina, stimulating foetal development.

“Babies learn to speak in response to sound stimuli, especially melodic sound. Babypod is a device that stimulates before birth through music. With Babypod, babies learn to vocalise from the womb,” reads the blurb on the company’s website.

There has been plenty of research on the effect of sound on foetuses, and evidence suggests that unborn babies do respond to music in the womb. There are already multiple speakers available on the market (“prenatal speakers”) which are fitted around a pregnant woman’s stomach.

Babypod, however, cites research from a gynaecological clinic, the Institut Marquès, that babies hearing external noise clearly is “solely possible via the vagina”, because the abdominal wall muffles sounds.

[ click to continue reading at The Guardian ]