With the number of mobile applications available from Apple’s App Store having reached, by conservative estimates, about 1 kajillion, you’d think developers would have run out of ideas. Think of the most obscure use for a mobile device, and chances are, there’s an app for that. Trouble reading the green on the golf course? There’s an app for that. Need to know surf conditions in the Mentawai Islands in Indonesia? There’s an app for that. Want to talk to your baby in the womb?
Indeed, there is an app for that. Nuvo Group USA has delivered the Ritmo Advanced Pregnancy Sound System, which “delivers unparalleled quality and safe sound to prenatal listeners,” according to a press release. (Okay, technically, it's more a peripheral than an app. Cut us some slack.)
“Reactive listening begins at 17 weeks,” according to the developers of this Bose for the Baby Bump, “so choose classical music for the calming Mozart Effect, the classic rock of The Beatles, or the upbeat show tunes of Broadway.”
(It would only be responsible on my part to note that there have been no studies of the long-term effects of listening to show tunes from the age of minus-23 weeks on.)
Alternatively, one supposes, one coulld influence fetal development in other ways. Tune in Rush Limbaugh to create a predisposition towards screaming at anything that smells like a civil liberty; listen to Fox News to make the poor creature too scared to come out; or mess with his/her head with old Mitch Hedberg comedy routines (“I love rice. It’s great when you’re hungry and want 2,000 of something.”)
