Susan Young

Infants and children in their earliest years (6 months to 3 years) are highly motivated to act on objects to produce sounds and to explore the possibilities of sound production. Yet educational practice and music education research rarely concentrate on very young children’s abilities to produce sounds with objects or with age-appropriate musical instruments. There is, however, a small corpus of studies that have explored sound production among the under-3s and have suggested the importance of this activity in early musical development. In this article we first introduce and discuss this corpus of studies. In light of the theories of musical gesture and sound production emerging from these studies, we then propose a complementary music education perspective for young children under 3 years of age which is focused on sound production with objects.

e might take a new approach, one in which, to value ourselves and each other, we do not need to denigrate nature, the past or the condition of childhood. We can stop pretending that some people are closer to nature, more primitive than ourselves. We can begin again to practise human dignity, this time without regard for chronological age. (Lee 2005, p. 71

ABSTRACT This paper presents a synthesis of findings from an international project studying the moment-by-moment mutual adaptation of two-year-old girls and their families engaged in everyday activities (Gillen & Cameron, 2010). This sociocultural study has involved a multidisciplinary team studying seven children in family settings in Canada, Italy, Peru, Thailand, Turkey, UK and USA. We sought to identify diverse ways of thriving, through an interpretive methodology with the videoing of a 'day in the life' of each child and her interactions with the environment, including caregivers, at the core. Our methodology involved dialogues with the families and between researchers. In this presentation we demonstrate findings from the Italian day, to illustrate activities that we have observed common to all settings. We do this through the presentation of three vignettes selected to illustrate our interpretive approach, our investigations into what might be considered innovative developmental domains such as musicality and which lead us towards an interactional perspective on multimodality. Our glimpses into the children's domestic worlds support a generally bidirectional view of socialisation (Pontecorvo, Fasulo, & Sterponi, 2001), as children and adults reciprocally co-construct their lives. Close examination of (relatively) naturalistic data has assisted the analysis of this element of the ecocultural framework within which these children and adults mutually adapt their diverse needs and intentions.

In the Italian city of Bologna, a group of mothers with their babies and growing children attended weekly music sessions and kept diaries, notes and recordings of their children’s musical activities. The inCanto project, as it was named, was an ambitious undertaking led by Johannella Tafuri working with her colleague Donatella Villa. The project studied musical development among a group of children recruited in the final stages of pregnancy until they entered formal schooling around the age of six. The premise on which the project was founded was that all children can sing in tune if they are taught in an environment which includes live singing, positive encouragement and the right strategies to teach singing in tune. A further premise was that all children are attracted to music and that the abilities to move, sing and play in time will develop earlier in relation to their peers among children who live in an enriched and continuous musical environment. Written to address a broad audience from academics, educators and parents, Infant Musicality is not intended to be a research report in the formal sense, but rather tells the story of the whole project and explains its major outcomes. In the first part of the book the project’s outcomes are presented from two points of view; that of the researchers presenting their findings within the more formal conventions of research, and also that of the parents who offer more personal and descriptive accounts. These chapters are preceded by a useful review of literature on musical development from birth to three years. The project claims to be the first research to study the development of certain musical abilities through the observation of skills gradually learned by the same group of children taking part in a programme of activities. This set programme was central to the project. It consisted of the group sessions, together with the expectation that parents would continue and encourage these musical activities at home; all the while keeping records. The parents were asked to complete diaries prepared by the researchers and submit these at regular intervals. The diaries contained a number of set possible responses from which to choose, imposing a level of control, therefore, on the data that emerged. Regular attendance and record keeping call for a level of commitment that, unsurprisingly, not all the original group of recruited children and their parents maintained. There were, of course, the usual reasons why parents unavoidably left the programme and numbers tailed off as it progressed from an initial number of over 70 fluctuating with time to a fairly consistent 30. A certain kind of parent would have been drawn to the programme in the first place, needing to be able to give the level of devotion and organisation the parents’ accounts tell us it required. These, in my view, were likely to have been a quite narrow band of parents whose values and

Introduction: Versions of Musical Childhoods The tradition of developmental psychology has been of fundamental importance in providing versions of musical childhoods, particularly for the earliest years of childhood. However, in its focus on the individual child and in its search for musical behaviors assumed to be common across all children, developmental psychology has tended to be insufficiently interested in wider cultural processes. At the same time, the disciplines of ethnomusicology, the sociology of music, and popular music and media studies, valuable as they are in describing and theorizing the nature of sociocultural practices in music, have almost nothing to contribute to our understanding of musical practices in young children's lives, particularly before they attend school. What insights we do have into children's musical lives are drawn mainly from studies of play activity when children are attending out-of-home care and education (Campbell 1998; K. Marsh 2005)...

In this article the author suggests that the persistence of a ‘performance model’ of early childhood music education has detracted attention from children's spontaneous musical activity. The article focuses on one dimension of children's spontaneous musicality: improvised singing. Descriptions of short episodes taken from two periods of observation, the first in a day-care setting among two- and three-year-olds and the second in a nursery among three-year-olds, provide examples of different kinds of improvised singing and how they are integrated into physical movement, and play with objects and malleable substances such as sand and water. The descriptions move into detailed discussion which draws attention to the way in which, as they play, the children's singing represents one mode blended among many and gives insight into time-based processes. The author goes on to suggest that these time-based processes support ways of engaging, either with material things or in inter...

The study of young children's creative music-making has been neglected in educational research in favour of the study of musical development in performance skills such as learning to sing in tune and perform rhythms. This neglect is in contrast to other domains, for example visual art, where there has been a tradition of research interest in children's self-initiated activity. This study sought to explore the spontaneous musical play on educational percussion instruments of three-and four-year-olds in early childhood settings typical for London, UK.

This paper explores the methodology of an ecological investigation of aspects of culture in the interactional construction of early childhood in diverse global communities: Peru, Italy, Canada, Thailand, and the United Kingdom. Regarding culture as a dynamic dimension of the child’s socialisation, the approach taken was to film a ‘day in the life’ of a two‐and‐a‐half‐year‐old girl in each location.

Gillen, Julia and Young, S. (2000) Participatory research with young children: engagements in dialogue with instrumental music-making and on the telephone. In: 10th European Conference on Quality in Early Childhood Education - EECERA Conference, 29th August - 1st ...

This research project, undertaken by an international collaborative team of researchers, set out to explore everyday music in the home among seven-year-olds, in diverse international locations. Each researcher visited one or two seven-year-olds at their home to collect information about their everyday musical activities and experiences. The data was assembled centrally, and each of the members of the research team has access to the collective data. Some broad interpretations are being arrived at via shared dialogue, and single researchers, usually focusing on their own locally collected data, have pursued some individual lines of interest. The project is ongoing and flexible. This article describes the background, method, and some of the general interpretations arising at this stage of the project. Conceptually, the project is aiming to move beyond ideas of universal or globally applicable models of musical development that have prevailed in music education, and to generate rich dis...

Page 1. International Journal of Music Education 30(1) 3 –17 © The Author(s) 2011 Reprints and permission: sagepub. co.uk/journalsPermissions.nav DOI: 10.1177/0255761411410144 ijm.sagepub.com 'We-research': Adopting a wiki to support the processes of collaborative ...

This paper explores the impact of limiting one's theoretical views of early childhood to deficit-based models on research designs in two areas: instrumental music-making and talking on telephones. Both research projects are described as involving populations of children in nursery school classes attached to primary schools. Both involved observation of children in independent, self-initiated activity (play with the telephone or musical instruments) and participation with the children on a one-to-one basis. Relevant equipment was placed in the nursery environment, and children were observed by regular visitors to the room. Key to the research methods and procedures used is the idea that researchers' attempts to ensure impartiality are likely to be more artificial and inhibiting to young children than they are to ensure participation. If children are allowed to initiate the research activity at its inception and retain a share of the initiative during the course of the researc...

Detailed analyses of adult-infant interaction among some European and North American populations have revealed that it resides on characteristics such as synchronous timing, phrasing, pitch contours and variations of dynamic intensity that are essentially musical in nature.  Moreover, this musicality of infancy is the medium which enables and supports the development of early communication.  Observations of practice and interviews with 15 early childhood music practitioners in England suggested that a consensual version of practice has evolved around the collective rendering of playful songs and musical activities.  However, this version of practice does not offer infant-appropriate musical experiences which might foster communicative musicality. 
The aim of the Music One-to-One project was to apply recent theories of infant musicality to practice. It was designed in three phases.  A First Stage gathered information from parents and practitioners about their current practices in music at home and in early childhood settings and their views and beliefs towards music.  It was considered important to take account of what parents and practitioners already think and do if the designed approaches were to be relevant, accessible and practical.  A Second Stage, moving through cycles of plan and review, explored practical approaches which blended what we had learnt of parents’ current practices, beliefs and views with the theories of infant musicality.  Although the groups of participating parents were small, final interviews suggested that some elements of the musical activity had influenced parenting practices in the home.  A final Stage Three of the project actively sought to provide bespoke materials and professional development for interested parties.

Today’s young children live in a world burgeoning with new technological devices.  Technological innovations, specifically the possibilities for digitised sound, bring with them profound changes in the nature of music and musical practices in the home.  Taking three examples of young children’s experiences of digitised music in everyday life as a basis, this chapter discusses the nature of those changes.  It goes on to consider what implications such changes hold for early childhood educational practice and how educational approaches might need to transform to best serve children whose musical experiences are so profoundly different from those of their ‘pre-digital’ teachers and parents.

References to neuroscience and the brain now crop up regularly in academic and pedagogical literatures in early childhood music education. In this article, I discuss this recent 'brainification' (a term coined by Vandenbroeck) of early childhood music and point out problems and pitfalls that can arise from this current enthusiasm for neuroscience narratives. Concern at the misinterpretation of neuroscientific research in music education, often referred to as neuromyths, has led to a small and important body of literature. This literature is reviewing, analysing and providing summaries of neuroscience in music, correcting misconceptions and clarifying the implications for educational practice. First, I introduce this work and outline its main arguments. However, despite these corrections and clarifications, neuromyths persist. Therefore, I go on to ask why-when the research base is being demonstrated to have many limitations-do certain neuroscientific ideas continue to occupy such a prominent position? The answer I suggest lies in the current context of social media proliferation of information together with the certainty that neuromyth narratives (falsely) promise. I will go on to explain how the prominence of neuromyths goes hand in hand with the current policy

This article offers a short commentary on the " state of play " in early childhood music education research to accompany the articles published in this special issue. It provides an international overview of recent research trends in this field, with examples drawn from Europe, the Americas, Asia, the Middle East, East and South Africa and Australia. This article offers a short commentary on the " state of play " in early childhood music education research to accompany the articles published in this issue. The commentary that follows presents my personal views, offered as someone who has been involved in music education first as an educator and then researcher for all my professional life. Hopefully it will prompt others to share their views so that through dialogue we can help to shape the future directions for early childhood music education research. Another author, from another part of the world, working in a different educational system, from a different disciplinary background, with a different biography would no doubt offer a different view. Interest in increasing our understanding of music among very young children has expanded considerably in the last 20 years. Contributions span multiple academic disci-plines—psychology, sociology, musicology, ethnomusicology, folklore and cultural studies, neuroscience—as well as the areas of applied research, primarily education, but increasingly therapy, community arts, parenting studies and childcare practices. In this edition alone the articles are orientated by theories from social cognition, psychoanalysis, developmental psychology , social psychology and identity formation and phenomenology. So the field of early childhood music, although comparatively small and internationally dispersed, is character-ised by varying theoretical frameworks and underpinned by different and often competing epistemological perspectives. The varying frameworks and perspectives may, in turn, be aligned and interrelated with policy contexts and pedagogical ideals, strategies and curricula that vary considerably from country to country.