What mother wouldn’t be overjoyed with a video that has a 96.2% success rate of stopping an otherwise well-cared for baby from crying?

Lotte, a major sweets producing company in Japan has created just this by coming up with a  promotion for Cafuca, their “extremely delicious milk candy”.  Since September 19th Lotte has been running this ingenious marketing strategy targeted towards mothers in their thirties.In the video, cute little animated “cafuca” creatures eat cafuca after cafuca to a tune which is guaranteed to stop a baby from cafuca, er, crying.

Why is it that this video can stop a baby from crying?  According to Ms. Matsumi Suzuki, Director of The Japan Acoustic Laboratory, there is scientific reasoning behind what’s going on in this video. Ms Suzuki, who supervised production of the video, explains that children show continuous interest in their surroundings.  A phenomenon called orienting reflexes allows them to process sudden changes in their environment.  If you give babies constant stimulus through songs and images they will forget their crying in order to take in these sudden changes.

A common misconception is that lullabies work best for calming a baby.  However, what will ultimately succeed is music with a beat, using a variety of different instruments and including different sounds. This means that heavy metal is more likely to stop a baby from crying than a lullaby because it has more of what it takes to kick in those orienting reflexes.

This video also uses a sound range of 6000 to 7000 hertz, which is ideal for babies’ ears.  The song uses useful sound effects to get the orienting reflexes going including pops, and vibration sounds in its lyrics.  A variety of sounds makes for an effective song.

The heroes of this video are the many little ‘cafuca kids’ who continuously pop cafucas into their big oversized mouths.  The little fellow embodies the fluffy, chewiness of cafuca candy.  He starts out alone on a hammock from where he wakes up for a ride in a sail boat.  As he pops cafucas into his mouth he multiplies and he is joined with more and more little fellows just like himself.  It starts to rain and they all scamper under one big umbrella.  The rain lets up and a rainbow appears across the sky.  By now the number of little cafucas have increased to the maximum.  With a “That was fun!” the original little one returns to his hammock for another sleep.  Along with the music you can understand how this strange little performance could hold little ones captivated, forgetting to cry.

An experiment demonstrating this video’s effectiveness was carried out with 52 babies, aged 0 to 3, the prime age for fretful crying.  Of the 52 babies who were shown the video when they were crying, 50 of them stopped.  That is 96.2% more quiet babies.  Those are astounding results!  Ms. Suzuki says that it would make her happy if the video could be useful to mothers who are troubled by fretful crying.

Some prestigious people gathered for the making of this video.  The music producer was Mr. Yosuke Fukui,  who produces music for well-known commercials and children’s programs on TV.  The Director was a Ms Fukunaga Mai who is a known movie producer.

Mr. Fukui comments that in producing this music he consciously gathered all the sounds that would do best in stimulating the orienting reflexes of a small child like percussion and xylophone.

Ms Fukunaga commented that when the cafuca character was explained to her she got an impression of a lethargic being so she livened him up for the video.

Inevitably, adults will also be drawn to this video and may not be able to take their eyes off of its strange, magical pull.

※ Note:  If a baby is crying from illness, hunger, or a dirty diaper, this video will not work.  If there is no apparent reason for the child to cry or he is crying for the want of  something he can’t have then try showing him the video.

Source: Excite Bit News