Music is first art with power to lift audience hearts

The late Zimbabwean musician Oliver Mtukudzi when he performed in Kenya in 2011. (File, Standard)

 “If music be the food of love, play on; give excess of it.” Four hundred years after Shakespeare’s Twelfth Knight, science now suggests we start feeding on this diet before we are born.

A fetus’ auditory system begins developing between seventeen and nineteen weeks, ushering the little being into a world of sound, of breath and heartbeat, of rhythm and vibration.