Musical experiences in the play of a 16-month-old child

Musical experiences in the play of a 16-month-old child Vanessa Stansall Centre for Research in Early Childhood (MA Student) Birmingham, UK [email protected] Abstract This small study was undertaken as part of an MA in Early Childhood Music Education. A case study of a 16-month-old child’s musical experiences through play in the home, it is informed by theoretical perspectives on child development and learning, musical learning and musical childhoods. The data were gathered through naturalistic observations of the child in his home and recorded in the form of video snapshots in time. Information about the child’s background was gained through a short conversation with his parents. Of the video taken over five visits with the family, three short vignettes were chosen for analysis. These vignettes were then transcribed as illustrative detailed descriptions. Vignette 1 examines the affordances of sound makers and how these influence a child’s music making. Vignette 2 considers the aural and physical environment and the role recorded music can play in affect regulation. Vignette 3 shows an episode with a musical toy and discusses the affordances of such toys, their capacity for multimodal use, and their role in parent-child interaction. The study identified implications for practice, some of the limitations of working in the home, and areas of interest for future research. Keywords Musical childhoods, parents, play, affect regulation, technology, interaction, Introduction This small-scale, qualitative case study investigated the musical experiences in the play of a 16-month-old child, George. Research with young children has more usually been focused on laboratory studies with younger infants or studies in nursery settings with children from three years old and accordingly there is less research with children of George’s age. This study aims to make a small contribution to the research on music in daily life (see, for example, Young and Gillen, 2007 and Young, 2008). George’s parents are Lola and Joe. George attends nursery Monday to Wednesday and is at home with Joe on Thursdays and Lola on Fridays. George’s mobility has developed rapidly over the last few months and the family increasingly spend time in the park and the garden where George can enjoy the space and permission to move around. They still attend certain parent and child classes, including a music group that Lola takes George to on Fridays. Musical toys as well as drums and a recorder are available to George at home. The radio is often on at home and in the car, usually BBC Radio 1 or BBC Radio 2. 262 This paper is based on an assignment carried out as part an MA in Early Childhood Music Education and includes some selected perspectives from the original paper. Research design The data were collected through naturalistic observations of the child in his home over five visits in the spring of 2016 and recorded in video form. The footage collected was edited and three short vignettes selected for analysis. These vignettes were then transcribed as illustrative detailed descriptions. The video was recorded on a mobile phone. George is used to adults in his home using mobile phones and it was hoped this would minimise any tendency to ‘perform’ for the camera, compared with a video camera. An additional consideration was whether George’s parents might try to set up specific musical situations in the home and it was made clear to them this was neither necessary nor desirable for the study. George was too young to sign a consent form and so the written consent of his parents was gained. George’s body language and facial expressions were monitored throughout however for indications of his ongoing assent or signs of distress. See Street (2007) for an exploration of ethical issues and the rights of young children in research in naturalistic settings. All names have been changed to protect the family’s identity. Vignette 1 George is sitting on the floor holding a spoon in his left hand. He puts it inside the cup next to him and strikes the base eight times. He looks inside the cup and strikes again six times. He picks up the cup and tries to drink from it. The spoon falls out. He puts it back inside and strikes eight more times, this time moving the spoon between two opposite sides of the inside of the cup. He makes a scooping motion and puts the spoon in his mouth. He hits the floor with the spoon 10 times singing ‘da da’ with the first two strikes, the two notes at the same pitch. He lifts the cup to his mouth and sings an open vowel sound. Holding the spoon between thumb and index finger he returns it to the cup, singing ‘mmm’ through a rising interval and striking the back of the spoon against the inner surface of the cup, this time with a wiping, slightly swinging motion. He places his hands on the floor and sings another rising vowel sound. He kicks his right leg three times to shuffle forward towards the step and sings ‘eek eek eek’. He positions himself on the step singing ‘mmmm’, the second note slightly lower than the first, then repeats this while he stands up and walks off towards the bin. A Piagetian view of George’s play points to the sensorimotor, exploratory nature of his striking gestures (Pound, 2012) and musical developmental models such as the Spiral of Musical Development (Swanwick & Tillman, 1986) have also pointed to the sensory, experimental nature of music-making in children of this age. The sensorimotor moments in George’s play seem to 263 alternate with units of pretend play, solitary play (Parten, 1932 cited in Tarnowski, 1999) or object play (Hughes & Melville, 2002). Marsh and Young (2006) however argue that such categories of play do not recognise the social aspects or real-life contexts of play and that far from being random and exploratory, children’s music-making is complex and structured. In a study with older children in a preschool, Young (2003) showed how structures in space relating to instrumental affordances and structures in time work generatively and organizationally in young children’s music-making. One such structure of time is clustering (Young, 2003, p. 54), where identical movements are repeated in a group followed by a pause, characteristically four to ten repetitions; such a pattern provides a fitting description of George’s rhythmic groupings. With regards to space and the shape of the cup, George’s initial striking motif with the spoon reoccurs, now moving back and forth in a straight line between the opposite faces of the inside of the cup, and then another time, going back & forth by swinging around the curve of the cup and wiping the inner surface. In this way the motif is transformed, creating a sequence. Does the swinging action dictate the pathway round the curve of the cup or does following that pathway give rise to the swinging action? In this particular example they seem inextricably linked. Young (2012) also suggests that the physical environment gives structure to children’s music and George incorporates other parts of his physical environment into his music-making, striking the floor and later the washing machine. For the adults of the house, only the soles of their feet are in contact with the floor; George however spends much time lying and sitting on the floor, it is much closer to him, and features more in his field of vision. After the clip finished, George extended his striking motif further, using the spoon in the larger circular space of the washing machine drum in what could be interpreted as a sound-gesture transfer (Delalande & Cornara, 2010) or potential schema (Pound, 2012) Vignette 2 It is morning and the family are preparing to leave for a holiday. Lola tells me that George ‘has been a bit fractious today’. They are in the kitchen and George starts slamming a cupboard door. Lola puts a song on. When George hears the music he turns his face away from the cupboard, listens and starts to bounce, bending his legs with his left arm out in front of him. He looks at Lola, who asks ‘are you having a boogie?’ in an encouraging tone. He lifts his left arm higher and continues to bounce, legs and arm moving together. He claps his hands together then returns his left arm to the air. He bounces for a few bars before again clapping his hands together then returning his left arm to the air. He starts to rock from left to right and then moves to the other side of the kitchen. Here he puts his left arm in the air again and tilts from left to right. He pauses to look at another adult in the room, a friend of his parents, who is watching and smiling. He lifts his arm 264 back up, and rocks again. He approaches the other adult and then returns to his space. He turns to look at me and then at Lola. He walks towards the door, pauses and rocks back and forth for a few seconds, before turning back into the kitchen. Music had been playing all morning via an online streaming service; Lola deliberately selected this song and she told me afterwards that it is a song that Joe loves and which he has danced to with George since he was born. In choosing this song deliberately to try to change George’s mood, we see how Lola uses the recorded music as a form of affect regulation. Much of the research on the use of music for affect regulation in infants has focused on parental singing (See Dissanayake, 2000, Trehub, 2004; and Trevarthen, 1999). The predetermined nature of recorded music of course limits opportunities for the parent-child dyad to dictate the pace of turn-taking and for the sonic content to be shaped in response to the infant, but other factors mentioned by Trehub, Ghazban, and Corbeil (2015) as being important in affect regulation, such as moving, smiling and touching need not be precluded when using recorded music. Young and Gillen (2007) describe different levels of involvement by family members in listening to recorded music as parents guide and support their children’s participation. In George’s family, Joe has previously supported George’s participation by dancing with him in his arms, and now that George is older and dances independently, Lola continues to support his participation by noticing his dancing and commenting on it encouragingly. The music may also act as a form of affect regulation for Lola herself, possibly relaxing her to see George happy or reminding her of meaningful moments for her family. George moves through the room, alternating between dancing on the spot and walking to a new place. This pattern concludes when he reaches the end of the kitchen at the start of the hallway. Here, instead of continuing on the same trajectory, he turns back into the kitchen. Hancock and Gillen (2007) in their study of two-and-a-half-year-old girls in the home found that the shape and quality of space elicited different movements from children. The hallway here is darker, narrower, a transitional space and perhaps is not as attractive an option to George for dancing. Vignette 3 George is sitting on Lola’s lap while she talks to a friend. He is playing with a toy with a number of buttons, each of which plays a different animal noise. He presses the ‘wolf’ button and hearing the howl that is played, copies it with his voice, lifting his right arm as he does so. This gains Lola’s attention and she asks ‘Did you do the wolf noise? Can you do it again?’, pressing the button for him. He copies the sound again, this time lifting the toy into the air with both hands as he does it. Lola laughs and imitates him, and so George presses the button again, making his own sound immediately rather than 265 waiting for the toy to finish its sound first. Lola presses more of the buttons. When she presses the duck sound, George lifts his arm into the air and starts to sing a falling melodic pattern, two long notes during which he holds his hand in the air and three short notes accompanied by waves of his arm. Lola presses more of the buttons. When she presses the dog button George replies with a ‘he he he’, bouncing himself on each sound he makes. Lola presses the wolf button and again George replies with a howl, this time lifting his left arm into the air. Lola comments that she thinks the arm action is George’s representation of an elephant. They press more buttons. On pressing the lion button, Lola comments ‘that one’s from Row, Row, Row, Your Boat. Do you want to do Row, Row, Row?’. George replies by singing three long notes, vowel sounds with a soft ‘r’ at the beginning, the melody falling in pitch over the three notes. Lola sings Row, Row, Row, and George turns to face her on the last line. She sings a second verse, and after the final words ‘don’t forget to roar’ plays the lion sound from the toy and makes a roaring sound herself, to which George turns and laughs. She starts a third verse. On the second line George turns to look at her, smiling. After the words ‘don’t forget to squeak’ she presses the mouse button and makes a squeaking sound, moving her face towards his neck. She sings another verse, this time with the final word ‘shiver’. She wraps her arm round him, making a shivering motion that shakes them both. Lola’s view was that George had listened to the howling wolf sound and, as the two sounds have similar contours, interpreted it as an elephant’s trumpeting, George’s arm movement representing the elephant’s trunk. She noted that George had recently seen an elephant statue in a shop and made the same noise and gesture. George’s interpretation of the wolf howl as an elephant trumpet may also be related to the sound quality of the toy. Young and Gillen note the prevalence of “anodyne, thin, neutral timbres” (2007, p.24) in toys and the lack of a distinctive timbre may make this sound more open to interpretation. In a study on the affordances of early childhood technological activities Carr (2000) suggests three factors: transparency, challenge, and accessibility, the last of which refers to the toy’s potential for social participation and collaboration. An initial reading might suggest this toy’s accessibility is low; only one person can press a button and only one button can be pressed at a time. Social participation in technology-enhanced toys is a matter of some debate and Young (2007) notes the polarization of opinion regarding childhood use of technology. Bergen et al. (2010) suggest that play with technology-enhanced toys in fact presents favourable conditions for adults to scaffold language, as the context is one of the child’s interests. Tamis-LeMonda, Kuchirko, and Tafuro (2013) propose that in a dyadic process of object exploration parents are more likely to use referential than regulatory language, providing the input multimodally to facilitate word learning. In naming the various animals, Lola 266 provides referential language input and this is indeed presented multimodally, including also sound, facial expression and gesture. Young and Gillen (2007) suggest that technology-enhanced toys do not displace parents’ musical participation with their children but supplement it. This toy encourages Lola and George’s object exploration and shared attention and inspires their musical participation; the lion sound acts as a trigger, a reminder of a song they have shared together. Lola asks George if he wants to sing it and he responds positively by singing the song. Each verse of Row, Row, Row is melodically identical, the repetition of verses creating a sense of expectation. Dissanayake (2012) describes how as infants get older they enjoy fun, silliness and divergence from expectation; in this song the divergence, and therein the fun, comes from the lyrical substitutions of place (shore, river and so on) animal (lion, mouse and so on), and accompanying noise. These noises represent the climax of each verse, in contrast with the original ‘life is but a dream’ verse which ends with a dimuendo and/or rallentando, more in line with Papoušek’s (1996) description of common structural features of early interactional games. The multimodality of these interactional games is important as it allows for songs to be repeated or varied depending on the infant’s signals of interest (Papoušek, 1996) and for non-verbal participants to contribute to the building up of an interaction (Fantasia et al., 2014). As Lola sings she also makes eye contact with George, strokes his hair and kisses him, and creates actions to represent the different animals. Each verse includes more physical contact than the last, starting with just singing the first verse, then adding the sound effect in the second verse, adding an ‘eeek’ and nuzzling George’s neck in the third verse, and in the fourth verse adding a shivering sound and enveloping George in the hug it appears the song has been working towards. Conclusion The study presented some methodological challenges. Some of the more interesting episodes were captured when George was left to play freely without any adult encouragement; these most frequently occurred when the adults were distracted and engaged in conversation, though this made those same videos difficult to use as the conversation obscured the audio recording of George’s music. In vignette 2, George turns around to face each of the adults in the open kitchen space; I would tentatively suggest that he may have been seeking or expecting some further interaction from one of them and that had this been forthcoming he may have demonstrated more extended engagement. It is possible that my presence was a factor in why this didn’t happen; perhaps Lola felt unable to intrude on what was being recorded or had unconsciously also taken on a role as ‘observer’. 267 Despite these challenges this study has provided an opportunity to examine the rich and varied musical world in which George lives. His music-making is structurally complex, he listens to a range of music for which he has tastes and preferences, and spends time with adults in musical interactions where he is an active agent. An understanding of these competencies and experiences is important for practice with such young children. The song to which George dances is perhaps not one that might be typically considered ‘music for children’ but it has a special meaning for Joe and for George who, through his smiles and dancing and apparent change in mood, seems to enjoy the song. On the basis of his play with the cup and washing machine George’s interests could lead him to, for example, find new ways of playing with a drum that exploit its internal cylindrical space; ways of playing which would risk being extinguished by a focus on an adult-constructed ‘correct’ way to play the drum. From this study a number of areas emerge where further research would be of interest, particularly around the effect of developments in technology on musical life in the home and more specifically how musical affect regulation works beyond parental singing and what the role of recorded music is in that, and how technological devices play a role in participation in parent-child interactions. 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