Sonic youth: vaginal speaker lets you play tunes to foetuses

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.

The pale pink device, which costs 150 euros (£110), is controlled by a phone app but does not use Bluetooth. Parents-to-be can share their babies’ listening experience using split headphones which hang out of the vagina.

The Babypod, which has a top sound level of 54 decibels, is recommended for use from the 16th week of pregnancy, and for between 10-20 minutes a time – or around half the length of the average Joanna Newsom song.

Babypod was launched at the “first concert for foetuses ever held in the world” in which Soraya Arnelas, who finished 23rd in the 2009 Eurovision song contest, “serenaded” 10 pregnant women fitted with the speakers, singing Christmas carols.

Babypod reassures customers that the vibrations of the device do not adversely affect a foetus – “this is why sex toys are allowed in pregnancy”.

One can’t help but think of the Curb Your Enthusiasm episode in which a woman is discovered smuggling a mobile phone in her vagina when Larry David calls it and hears it ring.

One can also imagine alternative uses for the Babypod speakers. Adele’s line “hello from the other side” from her huge hit, Hello, would surely come into its own echoing from the vagina during a particular sex act.

Testimonials from users on Babypod’s websites praise the fact that ultrasound scans showed their babies singing along or mouthing a response to music from the speakers. Which means that, should a sadistic mother-to-be ever choose to play Osmond’s Puppy Love, a foetus should be able to object accordingly.