Music Learning in Childhood Early Developments of A Musical Brain and Body John Trevarthen

Flohr, J. and Trevarthen, C.
(2008), Music learning in childhood: Early developments of a musical brain and

body. In W. Gruhn and F. Rauscher (eds.) Neurosciences In Music Pedagogy, pp. 53-99. Nova Biomedical
Books, New York.
MUSIC LEARNING IN CHILDHOOD

EARLY DEVELOPMENTS OF A MUSICAL BRAIN AND BODY
John W. Flohr and Colwyn Trevarthen
"My aim is to show, although this is not generally attended to, that the roots of all
sciences and arts in eve,y instance arise as early as in the tender age, and that on
these foundations it is neither impossible nor difficult for the whole
superstructure to be laid; provided always that we act reasonably as with a
reasonable creature."
(John Amos Comenius (1592-1671) The School of Infancy. Translated by D.

Benham , London , 1858)
ABSTRACT
This chapter presents a psychobiological model of early musical behaviours or
ways of moving musically - one that accepts music as a natural behaviour
essential to being human. At least in infancy and preschool years , an innate
communicative musicality is inseparable from other ways children demonstrate a
lively self-expression while acting in intensely sociable ways. New evidence on
the remarkable musical awareness in infants has important implications for
teaching of musical knowledge and skills that are specific to a particular culture .
We record how a preschool child' s spontaneous vocal perfonnances and
enjoyment of musical sound is interwoven with growth of all expressive
movement and gesture , with the emotions, and with cognitive processes of
exploration, discovery and relating on which every kind of cultural learning
depends. We give special value to the vital sense of individuality and pride in
recognised achievement that can grow in interactions with appreciative
caregivers, peers and teachers. In accord with the social cultural theories of
learning , we view education, including musical education , as a part of natural
human social life , a life that has evolved to make and use culture as a community
of meaning.
54 John W. Flohr and Colwyn Trevarthen
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First, to introduce the topic, we contrast “teacher-centred” or instructive training of

preset skills, in perception and performance of established forms of music and musical
literacy, with approaches called “child-centred” that claim to recognise, and give primary
importance to, the young child's spontaneous pleasure in creating and sharing song and
dance. In support of an approach that recognises the musicality children bring to music
learning, we then review research with infants that has provided evidence in the last few
decades for a theory of the innate foundations of communicative musicality. An age-
related program of development has been found that reveals intrinsic motives that prompt
the child to act in increasingly sophisticated ways, and to learn cultural skills with an
increasingly competent body and mind, by collaboration with what other people do and by
attending to the conventional organisation of what they know. Third, we look at modern
science of movement to gain a clearer picture of what it is the mind of a child does when he
or she shows intentions, interests and feelings by rhythmic and expressively modulated
activity of the body, and a willingness to learn new motor skills. This leads us to consider
how the brain is formed to communicate both cognitive and emotional states by controlling
the time and effort of body movement, and how it adapts to cultural forms of art and
language.
Musicality is identified with the capacities of human brain motives to (a) regulate the
rhythmic moving of an exceptionally complex bipedal body with intricately mobile limbs
as one gracefully coherent system, and (b) to be moved to sympathetic activity by other
persons' intentions and emotions expressed in their gestures, and thus (c) to collaborate in
learning and the social creation of meaningful activities of great complexity. We draw
support from new evidence on the power and adaptive flexibility of the developing human
brain to mirror the motive impulses of other people, to pick up and engage with their
purposes and emotions, and to seek to be transformed by new ways of perceiving and new
ways of acting. It is clear that the aptitude for learning a particular tradition of music built
by previous generations depends upon childish motives and emotions, and on the influence
of sympathetic communication with other persons on both cognitive growth and motor
skills learning in brain tissues when they are at their most impressionable.
In the last section we seek to identify principles for a developmentally appropriate
music education by comparing selected music education methods. Adaptation to musical
culture appears to richly exercise all the special motivating and learning processes of the
young human brain in its regulation of a body alive in the world of sound and human
company. Music and music education serve a role in the promotion of the individual well-
being, confidence, and social adaptation of the young child, and it can open the way to a
lifelong enjoyment of learning - in making, responding to and sharing the inventions of
music.
INTRODUCTION: CULTIVATING MUSICAL BEGINNINGS

Scholastic work on the culture of education (Bruner, 1996) has a long history in our complex
and highly technical civilisation, and there are many theories of how a young pupil can learn to play
music, and how children should be taught to perceive and understand music (Flohr. 2004). Usually
these theories begin by a systematisation of the material to be learned, a classification of the
established structural elements, symbols, codes of practice and texts of the tradition. In this chapter,
however, we do not intend to discuss how a general learning theory might apply to the teaching of
advanced music cognition or performance skills. We
Music Learning in Childhood. 55
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propose that musical development, especially in early years, can best be fostered by supporting and
encouraging the spontaneous vitality and inventiveness of human movement and gesture, by 55
recognising children's rhythmic expression of motives and emotion, and their communication of
affections, thoughts, ideas and cooperative activities in singing ways. Music can be taught in such a
way that is supports how every young child is motivated, from within, to form collaborative and
creative relationships in moving, and to pick up new ideas and elaborate rituals of performance
from other people.
Schooling is by no means universal-children everywhere learn much by sharing activities and
collaborative tasks, by intent participation, and in some communities there are no schools (Rogoff
et al., 2003). Focusing on infancy and preschool years, we view formal education in any musical
tradition as a cultivated product of natural human social life and the active creation and using of
meaning by mimesis, that is, the social presentation of ideas, purposes and feelings in patterns of
whole body movement, by intuitive analogy (Donald, 2001). Thus we align our position with the
social-cultural theories of learning; for example, Comenius (1642/1969), Rousseau (1762),
Malinowsky (1923), Dewey (1938/1963), Vygotsky (1978), and Bruner (1996). We also draw
support from recent developments in the theory of how the human culture-making mind evolved
through elaboration of expressive ways of moving that are exhibited from birth, and that receive
strong intuitive support from parents and other companions of the young child (Dissanayake, 2000a,
b; Donald, 2001; Freeman, 2000; Mithen, 2005).
We are led to contrast two strategies for the teaching of music. One gives primary importance
to the form of music that has been assigned to be learned, from outside-a new skill to be mastered
according to externally defined criteria and rules; the second approach consciously appreciates and
shares the spontaneous, creative, and perhaps anarchic, musicality that the child already possesses,
inside, as motives for living and learning with companions. The teaching is either more a putting in
from without, with distant curricular ends in view, or more propelled from within the expectations
of teacher and child together, by the enjoyment of discovery of new meaning for moving in the
present, a meaning that can become a memorable guide to future adventures.
The first teacher-centered approach defines the music in its conventional, cultural, largely
artificial textual form. It specifies a process of learning, the structures to be perceived and
measurable levels of execution to be achieved. It is led by prescribed concepts and categories,
identifies the notes and follows the score from the teacher’s point of view. There is, usually, critical
appraisal and formal assessment by an educated listener who gives importance to the level of
performance and the students’ ability to discriminate standard and well-defined musical elements.
The second child-centered approach is intentionally open to the child’s fluid experience as a
naturally creative musical being, to the flow of experience and emotion of one who, while certainly
naive in understanding of music, is able to try and to express messages that have the rhythms and
graceful regulation of song or dance released in a native state - a state that is at first free of any
cultural rules or language, but ready to learn new ideas and stories by active experimenting, and
from a teacher of any age.
While the two approaches are very different in their basic assumptions about learning, in
practice music teachers normally apply both in varied combinations, with different emphasis. For
example, a teacher utilizing the Dalcroze or Orff method of teaching music will often
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emphasize the child-centred approach, stressing the value of improvisation and creative
experiences. The same teacher may also operate a teacher-centred, instructive method for musical
skill training. Any experienced teacher of young children who prefers to instruct by the book, will
appreciate the importance of communicating well with the attentiveness and willingness to practice
of children, disciplining by engagement, communicating by what Fred Erickson calls "going for the
zone", meaning the Vygotskian zone of proximal development of the child (Erickson, 1996). Few
teachers will practice only a teacher-centred or child- centred approach. (For a comprehensive
review of the range of music teaching methods for early childhood see Flohr, 2004).
We propose that, even for an adult, learning to be a good musician (mastering the music with
discipline and how to perform pieces composed by other musicians for the appreciation of listeners
of the tradition) requires full encouragement and use of the same inherent musicality that children
demonstrate from birth, as well as years of disciplined practice. It needs, besides a willing effort to
learn and to relish the work of learning (Csikszentmihalyi & Schiefele, 1992), the expressive
manifestation of pleasure in telling one’s own story in sound, making patterns that are enchanting,
exciting, enthralling and emotive or moving, for the self and for others. Musical learning certainly
begins best that way (Custodero, 2002; Custodero & Johnson-Green, 2003; Frohlich, 2002, in
preparation; Moorehead & Pond, 1978). A teacher must not merely recognize and respect the child's
inventiveness of musical expression, but must be prepared to share it - to be as creative or playful as
the child while stretching the aims and expectations in constructive ways, teaching an established
knowledge that confirms intuitions and motives while enriching them and making them part of a
large community of art and knowledge.
It has been demonstrated that the acquisition of high musical skill by an older child, over about
7 or 8 years, requires both many hours of practice and a close and sustained attachment to a
responsive and appreciative teacher (Sloboda & Davidson, 1996). There is much evidence that the
motivation, imagination and memory of a child, and learning ability, are changing greatly after this
age, a time when formal schooling is beginning, or has already begun, in industrialised societies
(Donaldson, 1992). Our task is to explore theories of motivation in younger children, before this
development of the human mind, for a life of music making in the company of other people, to
discover how the learning of intricate traditional forms of musical work and invention is prepared
for in childish human nature, in the ways all of us act and experience our actions in sound from
birth.
This, we know, is not a new direction of inquiry, but it is a lively and challenging one,
especially so in the last few decades as the intrinsic musicality of infants has been demonstrated and
the intuitive musicality in responses of parents has been recognised as an essential support for
language learning (Malloch, 1999; Papousek & Papousek, 1981; Trehub. 2004; Trevarthen, 1999).
We find it is necessary to further explore children's musicality and the teaching of music following
ideas of Emile Jaques-Dalcroze (1921), Moorehead & Pond (1978), and others concerning the
importance of using all resources of the body, of the brain and of the environment, and especially
the pleasure of creating with willing companions.
We will attempt to relate music learning to the unique adaptations of the human body and brain for
an active and creative life in communication with other people. It is interesting to observe how brain
scientists with access to new methods of functional brain imaging are
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often encouraged by psychologists to measure differences in neural tissue volume or the distribution
and strength of neuronal activity that correlate with narrowly defined levels of musical skill,
comparing experienced and inexperienced subjects to distinguish possible innate differences from
effects of the practice to develop that skill. They ask if the results of conventional tests of musical
discrimination, for rhythm, pitch melody or harmony, or of performance are related to the growth of
hypothetical cognitive organs of musical intelligence, or if they are entirely products of stimulation.
Great importance is given to the plasticity of regions of the brain that appear to be imprinted with
stimulus information and enlarged or structured so they can function as repositories for
representations of practiced actions or often-experienced cognitive categories.
But the neuroscientists are increasingly aware that they will have to study the functions of the
embodied and active mind embedded in its world (Clark, 1997; Varela, Thompson & Rosch. 1991),
with sensitivity to the regulation of rhythms and temporal phases of motor activity and attention, to
emotions, and to the extraordinary and still little understood capacities of a human brain in one
person for mirroring or sympathising with the intentions, interests and feelings of other brains in
other persons (e. g. Adolphs, 2003; Decety & Chaminade, 2003; Gallese, 2003; Schilbach et al.,
2006; Thompson, 2001).
Until recently few researchers have investigated the movements, or the motivations for moving
and perceiving, that lead to or transmit musical experiences in real time, and it is technically
difficult to do so, though new technology for tracking brain activity with high temporal resolution is
changing that (loannides, 2001; Turner & Ioannides, in preparation). At the same time evidence is
accumulating that what most readily transfers between human brains are the dynamics of intentions
and emotions implicit in other persons' forms of movement (Gallese, 2003; Schilbach et al, 2006).
When the dynamic, body-moving, emotional and interpersonal emotive aspects of musical
enjoyment and training are considered, and not just the perceptual, cognitive and memory functions,
the answers from brain research may be very different from those presently available.
We come to the conclusion that to practice and learn singing or instrumental music
performance is to cultivate both the body and brain in ways that human bodies and brains are
evolved to be cultivated. Brains are evolved to be changed by use while they are in control of
movements. Music education is attained through personal effort at making actions of the body
efficient and satisfying, to benefit the vital emotional regulations of a conscious, intentional self.
Music education helps to share life, actions and experiences in sound that can become a home for a
community of meaning where the individual is a recognised and appreciated companion with a
musical individuality, no matter what level of skill in musicianship he or she has attained. To be
helped to experience and enjoy music in this way is a natural right of every child (MENC, 1991).
We have to keep intact the natural vitality of singing and dancing when we work as music
educators, for this is the source from which all the aesthetic and social powers of musical culture
flow.
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THE INNATE MUSICALITY OF

INFANTS AND YOUNG CHILDREN
It takes years of self-motivated work and guidance from expert teachers to train a skilled singer
or instrumental musician, and a lifetime to know and understand or deeply appreciate a musical
tradition. No infant or toddler is bom a musician, although their musical expressions can be
interpreted that way (McPherson, 2006). They do not have the vocal organs or control of the voice
to be a developed singer, nor do they have the oral and manual dexterity to play an instrument
properly to make what an adult would recognize as music. Nevertheless, the foundations for making
and sharing musical sounds and dancing movements of the body are there long before a baby can
stand, and babies love simple music and musical games from birth. Infants have considerable
capacities for appreciating elements of musical sound, and quite remarkable abilities to time their
limited vocal repertoire in rhythmic engagements with an adult who is responding musically. This is
the paradox of infant communicative musicality. By means of detailed musical acoustic analysis,
Stephen Malloch has identified expressive parameters, of pulse, quality and narrative in the earliest
vocal dialogues between parents and infants (Malloch, 1999; Trevarthen & Malloch, 2002). How
should we interpret these behaviours that appear to anticipate the performance and appreciation of
musical art? Why do human infants have sensitive talents for appreciating musical sounds when
even a modest proficiency in music is, at best, several years away? Clearly infant musicality must
express and serve some other fundamental developmental need of every human being. Perhaps it is
a need to express intentions by moving the voice and limbs in expressive ways, to communicate.
Maybe music is a cultivated product of motives of all humans for sharing what goes on in their
minds and bodies.
Research of the last few decades has transformed scientific recognition of the infant mind, and
especially the capacity a baby has from birth to engage an affectionate adult in communication,
using all the senses to appreciate the qualities of human expressive movement (Stern, 2000;
Trevarthen, 1998). Infants just a few weeks old express themselves with face, hands and voice, and
all their body, when they communicate in response to certain of the lyrical, rhythmic and repetitive
patterns of parental talk. These are the very patterns of expression that distinguish the sounds of
music and poetry (Miall & Dissanayake, 2003). Infants also discriminate and are attracted to subtle
features of the human sounds of song or musical performance, showing certain preferences for pitch
level, rhythm and harmony that are similar to those of adult listeners (Trainor & Zacharias, 1997;
Trehub, 2004). These delicate auditory sensibilities are met by intuitive forms of parental
communication that engage immediately with the infants' expressions, joining adult and infant in
the intimate art of shared human vitality, beginning, many researchers now believe, the teaching of
culture specific rituals, ideas, and the meanings of things that people make and use, including the
language they talk (Fernald, 1992; Freeman, 2000; Halliday, 1979; Papousek, H., 1996; Papousek,
M., 1996; Papousek. Papousek & Symmes, 1991; Trehub, 2002). The abilities of human infants
exceed even the remarkable skills that some birds and mammals show for emotional expression and
social communication, and they are far more adaptable to the habits and inventions of the
community (Wallin, Merker & Brown, 2000; Eckerdal & Merker, in preparation).
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Proto-Musical Responses of Foetuses and Newborns
Infants are born with sensitivity for the rhythmic expressive movements of other people. They
attend with eyes, ears and touch, and show responses with a matching sense of time in movement.
Affectionate adults are attracted to the infant's interest and modulate their talk and gestures to
engage in games of address and reply or assertion and apprehension of intentional looks,
vocalisations and hand movements and touches. Even breast-feeding becomes a conversation as the
infant makes rhythmic bursts of nipple-stimulating non-nutritive sucking in interaction with the
mother's talking, stroking or jiggling. This kind of sucking seeks responses and learns from their
contingency of timing. Newborns call for attention with pulses of breath, exercising their immature
and high placed vocal apparatus with powerful cries and rhythmic sobbing.
In the month and a half before a full term birth (before 30 weeks gestation), with senses
adapted to an aqueous environment, the foetus listens to the mother's voice, learns its distinctive
timing and tonality, moves in responsive contact with her body, sometimes reacting with bursts of
rhythmic movement to the pulse of sounds outside her, including the sounds of music (DeCasper &
Spence, 1986; Fifer & Moon, 1995; Lecanuet, 1996; Trevarthen et ah, 2006). In fact, the child’s
hearing develops in the third trimester usually by the 26lh week (Flohr, 2004, p. 20). The foetus
drinks amniotic fluid by swallowing, and the lungs also expand and contract breathing the liquid.
Changes of heart rate and foetal breathing, and of gestures and expressions seen with ultrasound,
give evidence of auditory awareness. Although there is little scope for the mother to be consciously
in dialogue with the consciousness and movements of the human being inside her, the foetus can
learn the expressive rhythm and intonation of her voice so that the signature of her speech will be
known and sought for after birth.
The potential of this foetal sensitivity for musical sounds in the last trimester of gestation is
demonstrated by the effective use of music as therapy in the Neonatal Infant Care Unit (N1CU)
(Standley, 2002). They are confirmed by the remarkable capacity of one prematurely born infant to
take part in a delicately timed vocal exchange. Spectrographic representation of a vocal dialogue
between a baby girl at 32 weeks gestational age and her father who was kangarooing her against his
chest under his shirt and imitating her simple calls indicated that the infant and adult could precisely
match one another's timing for both syllabic (0.7 seconds) and phrase (4 seconds) units of time, and
the infant could improvise the phrase intervals to call the father repeatedly when he failed to
respond (Malloch et al., 1997; Malloch, 1999; Trevarthen, Kokkinaki & Fiamenghi, 1999). These
times match the durations of utterance and phrase found in spontaneous vocal productions of infants
(Lynch et al., 1995). as well as in mutually regulated conversational exchanges with parents that
develop in early months. It should be noted that the father of this premature infant closely matched
her performance by imitating the pitch, timbre and duration of her sounds. He and she were clearly
establishing mutual sympathy and reciprocal interest by matching vocal expression with
comparable auditory awareness, and essentially the same brain-generated sense of time. Very
similar timing in vocal exchanges with premature infants have been recorded in a large NICU in
Tokyo (Watanabe, et al., 2006).
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This kind of sympathy, extending to a wide range of visible and audible expressions
involving movements of eyes, face, mouth and hands, has been demonstrated in studies of
newborns imitating adults. Infants imitate a surprising range of odd human expressions in the
first days or hours after birth including large tongue protrusion, a wide open mouth, raised index
finger and other finger extensions, tightly closing eyes, looking up high, simple vocal calls
(Field et ah, 1982; Heimann, 1998; Kugiumutzakis, 1999; Maratos, 1982; Meltzoff & Moore,
1977, 1998). These imitations can become a well-regulated turn-taking dialogue if the adult is
appropriately respectful of the infant's initiatives, for example, waiting for and accepting the
infant's repetition of an imitation as an invitation for reciprocal imitation (Nagy & Molnar,
2004). Emese Nagy has shown that as the infant changes between imitating and giving back the
audible or visible expressions that the adult has presented as models, there are changes in his or
her heartbeat, which are indicative of alternating brain states of effort or attention. With
imitation the heart of the infant accelerates, and with provocation or questioning of the adult,
the heart decelerates (Nagy & Molnar, 2004).
Neonatal vocal imitation is limited, but within a few weeks the baby can match simple vowel
sounds of differing timbre as well as the rhythm of a short group of repeated sounds Research on
imitations of infants from the first weeks has found that imitative exchange with adults {infant
mimesis) is characterised by expressions of emotions of interest and pleasure (Kugiumutzakis et
al., 2005). The infant's behaviours are not simply automatic mirroring of the shape of a
movement, but a means of establishing sympathetic motives, or intentions to communicate
(Kugiumutzakis, 1998; Trevarthen, Kokkinaki & Fiamenghi, 1999; Trevarthen, 2006).
Newborns demonstrate, as we have seen, a precise sense of timing, integrating together all
forms of movement, one that matches the natural cadences of adult movements (Trevarthen,
1986, 1999). The graceful efficiency of the baby's complex, flowing postures and gestures, the
movements of hands that feel objects they touch, the precision of the coupled saccadic eye
movements that search the newly seen world, and life-sustaining movements of feeding,
breathing and vocalising indicates they possess an integrated prospective guidance of their
actions (Adamson-Macedo, 2004; Craig & Lee, 1999). They display the beginnings of a sense
for emotional episodes or emotional narratives in the expressions of other persons, anticipating
cycles or flow of energy or mood (Stem, 1992, 1999). These emotions, regulated by inborn
affective systems of the brain, are adapted to control the seeking of experience, systems that
provide defence against stress, pain or harm, and that make appeals for parental care (Panksepp
& Bernatzky, 2002; Trevarthen et al., 2006). Their purposeful movements and emotional
expressions indicate that the newborns are conscious and intending human creatures, who can be
aware of other humans as different from and sympathetic with themselves (Trevarthen & Reddy,
2006).
For their part, mothers and fathers seeking to communicate with their babies, in any language,
greet them with melodious vocal sounds and talk and move rhythmically as if dancing and singing
(Fernald, et al„ 1989; Papousek, M.,1996). Their infants attend to this parentese and, with their
limited vocal repertoire, often coo in precisely complementary ways, accompanying their sounds
with expressive facial mimics and gestures of the hands.
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The Musicality of Proto-Conversations
Rapid improvement in visual perception in early weeks after birth with developments
in the vocal system , increase the variety precision of exchanges between infant and
parent. Jn the second month enjoyable protoconversations involve intent mutual gaze,
and transactions of face expression, voca li zation, hand gestures and touching (Bateson,
197 5). A parent holding a two-month-old adjusts posture and movement to favour face-
to-face communic ation , because the baby is so obviously interested to see and hear
them. The infant's intent gaze evokes periodic and carefully modulated responses.
Acoustic analysis of the vocalisations passed back and forth has revealed the complex
and precisely regulated rhythmic and expressive collaboration of sound making (Malloc
h, 1999). The baby has a good sense of conversational timing , and this contributes
significantly to the attachment the parent feels for the baby, fostering care and
enjoyment of the baby, which benefits development (Beebe et al., 19 85; Jaffe et al.,
2001 ). If the parent is depressed and fails to be responsive with vocal and other means
of expression , this discourages the in fant, who becomes withdrawn and difficult to
console (Murray & Coo per, 1997; Robb , 1999). Experiments have shown that this
reaction is due to a high sensitivity for the immediate contingency and emotional
appropriateness of parental responses (Murray & Treva rthen , 1985; Nadel et al., 1999
; T reva rthen , 197 5; Tronick et al., 1978).
From three months , as the body gains more strength to move the head free of
support and the baby can extend and direct the arms and hands to track and grasp
objects (von Hofsten, 2004), the rituals of gesture play and baby songs are learned
and anticipated by infant and parent with increasing sociable joy or pride (Treva
rthen , 2002). By six months the infant practices melodious improvisations of voice
and gesture, becoming both a composer and a collaborative performer (Little ton,
2002 ; Papousek , M., 1996 ). The infant's expressive sense is gaining an aesthetic /
mo ral emotionality that identifies and regulates attachment and companionship and
the formation of the child's identity as a performer with a repertoire that familiar
company will appreciate with pleasure (Reddy, 2003; Trevarthen , 1990). Parents
perceive that clear emotions are expressed in the effort and tonality of extended
vocalisations of babie s, and they use song and body movements to excite play or
modulate distress (M. Papousek , 1996; Trainor , 19 96, 2002; Trehub et al., 1 993,
1997). This endows the child with a general sociability so that groups of infants
under 9 months old, with no adult present , can set up intricate negotiations of
interest and mood , and they may improvise together displays of vocalisation and
body dancing (Bradle y, in preparat ion; Selby & Brad le y, 2003). The baby is
beginning to show clear entrainment to the rhythms of m usic , bouncing the body in
imitation , and expresses delight when recognising the beat and melody of a lively
tune (Littleton , 2002 ; Mazokopaki & Treva rthen , in prep.).
After 3 months , infants are willing subjects in laboratory tests of their interest in and
consciousness of human made sounds, including musical sounds and the sounds of
speaking (Kuhl, 1985; T rain or, 19 96; Trehub , 1990). They prove to be perceptive of
far more features of the musicality of sounds than they can control in their own vocal
productions or by manipulation of resonant objects as instruments. As was true for their
awareness before birth, profic ienc y of listening is far in advance of versatility in
performance, serving as a way to
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establish synchronisation and alternation with the much more elaborate productions
of their older human companions (Eckerdal & Merker, in preparation).
Collaborative Improvised Musical Games and Traditional Nursery Songs

As the baby grows in powers of expression, affectionate parents generate
expressive movements, vocalisations and talk that respond to and regulate the infant's
playful motives. As the baby becomes livelier and more distractible by things to look
at, grasp and manipulate, caregivers recall traditional baby songs or improvise song-
like vocal play with dancing movements either to engage a playful infant or to pacify
a restless or distressed one.
There are differences in non-European cultures, especially clear when comparisons are
made to communities where schooling and literacy do not exist, and in which different value
is placed on talking to infants or on giving them physical exercises to enhance their postural
development and locomotion (Diss anayake, 2000a; Takada, 2005). Nevertheless , universal
features of timing and modulation in infant directed speech , baby songs and the movement s
of gesture games and baby dancing confirm the intrinsic , culture-independent motive
processes of both infants and adults, and a fundamental rhythmic musicality, which has been
inferred from the communicative behaviours of newborn infants (Treva rthen , 1999).
A film of a blind 5-month-old Swedish baby moving her left hand while her mother sin gs
two baby songs composed by Alice Tegner reveals an amazing, completely intuiti ve ,
complexity of gestural imagination as the little girl, who has never seen any human hand ,
listens to her mother's singing (Tegner, 1995). She dances or moves expressively to the
melody of the song, matching subtleties of rhythm and tone of voice with waving of the arm,
lifts and rotations of the wrist and spreading and pointing of the fingers. Data from
microanalysis of the film compared to a spectrograph of the mother's voice indicated that the
infant was anticipating her mother's vocal gestures by an interval of 300 milliseconds . She
knew the songs and could lead her mother in their duet of expressive moving. Moreover, the
analysis reveals that her active participation is intermittent. At times she seemed to pause to
just listen, and occasionally she appeared to reflect on or think about a previous phrase,
gesturing to he rse lf , out of time with the singing at that moment.
At this level of human sympathetic engagement, where the referential content of an la
nguage , including the text of the song , is of no importance and where cultural rituals of
gesture and voice are just beginning to be emphasised and learned , human musicality ha
s to be seen as a part of a much more general innate creative impulse driving actions
and awareness, one that is seeking to share with other persons the experience of moving.
The blind baby was not taught to move to the music.
Research on baby songs, vocal chanting and dancing games or other ritualised forms
o moving and touching has found that every human society uses them , in some form , to
stimulate play and joint participation after the infants are about three months old. After
three months the infants are highly attentive to rhythms and rhyming of movements
and vocalisation, and to the emotional quality or aesthetic style of the adult's
performance. The are also more agile in their gestures and vocal output than before, as
well as more ale visually. A song or action game made with joy and affection elicits
happy engagement, and
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the infant learns a repeated enjoyable ritual, shows pleasure at hearing the beginning of a familiar
melody, and can demonstrate anticipation of ends of phrases or the climax and ending of a song by
vocalising in tune (i.e. matching pitch), or by gesturing in time. The baby is then apparently
engaged by the emotional envelope of the presentation, or its narrative (Malloch, 1999; Stern, 1992,
1999; Trevarthen, 1999).
What is innate here is an avidity to learn others' ways of acting and thinking by moving
expressively, and the parent responds intuitively to teach by moving expressively in deliberate ways.
By six months simple culture specific ways of moving in performances, such as the actions of a
hand-clapping song, are taken up and used or 'shown off by infants in games with their familiar
companions (Trevarthen, 2002). These learned behaviours are associated with strong expressions of
shared enjoyment, or pride, which recall the emotion of pleasure that is found to be associated with
even neonatal imitations. A six-month-old, now able to sit up and move arms and hands effectively,
has limited vocal capacity compared to a one-year- old, but can call, gurgle, giggle and squeal, and
can assume a special voice, matching the rhythm of vocal expression with waving or bouncing
gestures (Reese, 1998; Littleton, 2002). He or she (girls being a couple of weeks in advance at this
age) may eagerly take part within a skilful performance of a range of songs and action games,
inserting small contributions at appropriate times and with appropriate pitch and intonation
(Trevarthen, 1999). The rhythms of babbling which appear around 6 months match those of banging
objects with the hands, and though the age of this development, like others, varies considerably
between babies, the two kinds of rhythmic activity develop together for each individual. Vocal
sounds are varied with communicative intent before the development of protolanguage at around
nine months (Halliday, 1979).
Musical games that have been shared are both recognised with pleasure and their repetition
actively solicited. The infant is clearly interested in becoming an active agent in family rituals of
play that others enjoy. Soon after six months a baby can recognise his or her name and certain other
frequent utterances made by familiar people, can imitate speech sounds, and sometimes emits what
seem like poetic or musical phrases (called jargon) (Locke, 1993; Jusczyk & Krumhansl, 1993).
Gestures with fingers and toes are becoming more elaborate and expressive as hands and feet
sensitively explore what they contact.
It is noticeable that a happy 6 to 8 month old baby is, becoming more of a show off or a clown
(Trevarthen, 1990). This behaviour indicates a growing consciousness of how other persons
appreciate and react to what is displayed for their attention. It has been taken as evidence of a new
self-awareness, but it is manifestly, at the same time, a heightened other awareness (Reddy, 2003).
Now the identity of the Other becomes of critical significance and a factor in the establishment of a
Self identity, including a musical identity for the infant (Trevarthen, 2002). Confronted by a
stranger, a baby who shows great pride in demonstrating how to sing or how to show "Clap-a-
Handies" in the approved manner to a family member, is confused and ashamed when in the face of
an uncomprehending stranger, who clumsily fails to get any effort the baby makes to show off
(Trevarthen, 1990; 2002).
By the middle of the first year at least, the sociability of the baby is strong enough, and willing
enough, to generate complex, emotionally regulated, interactions between peers. Groups of two or
three babies with no adults present can communicate and do so in subtle ways, showing that they
can create a form of drama among them, inventing new mannerisms
________________________________________________________________________________
and ritualistic games to gain group acceptance or to protest exclusion (Selby & Bradley, 2003;
Trevarthen, Kokkinaki & Fiamenghi, 1999). These games can include group vocal performances
(Bradley, in preparation).
Infants' Musical Intentions

The temporal arts have their innate roots in language-free intimacy, where the experience of an
embodied Self, moving and sensing the body in time and with rich emotional colour, evokes
intuitive sympathetic response from affectionate others, those who assume parenting responsibilities
for the baby agent/performer (Dissanayake 2002 a,b). We are persuaded by the precocious talents of
infants as performers, and the value given to these behaviours by parents, that human infants are
born seeking to engage with the intentions of other people in rhythmic musical ways. Babies sense
that acting a part and playing an active roll in a ritual of shared movements is how to be part of the
community, as anthropologists have observed to be the case across the world (Blacking, 1976,
1988; Dissanayake, 1988; 2000a; Takada. 2005; Turner, 1974).
The agency of the infant's Self includes active postural movements and gestures with
orchestrated rhythms that define and explore awareness, first of the body itself, felt in its flesh and
joints proprioceptively, then of the world outside that the body comes in contact with and
appreciates exproprioceptively, by touch and hearing before birth, then by sight. This growing
consciousness is guided emotionally. The flow of enterprise gives the efforts of moving evaluations
of pleasure and elation, or tension, urgency, and fear (Csikszentmihah: & Csikszentmihalyi, 1988;
Custodero, 1998). In normal circumstances of human company, all these states and moods assessing
the fate of the Self-in-action can be picked up and aided/abetted or opposed/rejected/neglected by
Others.
For musical development it is the same. The innate musicality can be nurtured b> intuitive and
joyful mentoring, or it can be left to satisfy itself as it will do when the child is left alone to exercise
inquisitive consciousness as best it can, or perhaps wither in competition with other ways of acting
sociably. From the earliest stages of development, and clearly already by the foetal stage, a human
body and brain are adapted for communication of enthusiasms and emotional experiences. The
regulatory systems of the inner visceral Self are greatly elaborated for Self-Other regulations by a
still mysterious capacity for sympathising with expressions of self-regulation (Porges, 1997;
Trevarthen, 2001; Trevarthen et ah, 2006
The potential for development of cognitive powers and motor skills is greater by sharing with a
more or differently experienced Other or group, and that is a primary way elaborate- cultural
practices and skills of awareness and exertion can be passed on in the community This is the
developmental use of human attachment (Bowlby, 1988) and why attachment figures matter.
Attachments of the child to Others are from the start not just protecm r contracts, but
teaching/learning relationships - companionships in which the purposes on acting are elaborated
through expressive movements that play out the dynamics of consciousness and intentionality, and
their emotions (Trevarthen, 2005; Trevarthen & Reddy 2006). Humans learn culture in all its forms
by mimetic sensitivity for intentional images expressed in movement projects of other persons
(Donald, 2001: Gallese & Lakoff. 2005)
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Musicality of voice and gesture is a crucial part of this evolved gift for showing and sharing
endlessly elaborate human intentions (Cross & Moreley, in preparation; Mithen, 2005). It is actively
learning simple cultural conventions in infancy.
Making Musical Meanings Beyond Year One: Children's Musical Culture

Infants make big advances in the second year, achieving new mobility, making new friends,
creating new meanings imaginatively with them in increasingly elaborate play, and understanding
language. They are surer of themselves in the world, and may assert their felt rights forcefully.
Given cheerful acceptance of their musicality and shared discovery of new favourite formulae, they
sing, for their own repeated pleasure or as part of delightful social encounters. The teaching,
training or scaffolding of cultural learning by adults is stretched and transformed by intrinsic
developments in the child. Adults shape what is wanting to be shaped. But different ideas about
what is good for children and what they should learn in different families or cultures can have a
large effect on how the innate motives to communicate and share purposes and experiences develop
into knowledge and skills. In an environment that values song and music of a particular tradition,
and that shares it with the toddler generously, the beginnings of real musicianship may become
apparent. Nevertheless, there are competing forms of knowledge and skill, and musicality may be
left little cultivated. In this connection it is interesting that children may enjoy the creation of
musical forms of play just for their own amusement, or for sharing with other young children. This
leads to the phenomenon of children's musical culture, a way of exercising musicality and creating
new forms of musical play that may not be much affected by the ideas and practices of the adult
world (Moorehead & Pond, 1978; Bjorkvold, 1992).
A toddler has new powers for understanding the purposes of other persons' ritualistic actions,
and can, for example, even acquire the artificial strict time of an instrumental performance with
percussive instruments (Eckerdal & Merker, in preparation). Toddlers, especially in groups with
their peers, expand their embodied expression, testing the freedom to dance and jump in richly
musical ways (Custodero, 2002). They transact imitations together, not just to do the same thing,
with the same items of dress or with the same instruments or toys, but for the pleasure of
negotiating and changing roles of leader and follower, which they find funny (Nadel & Peze, 1993).
Their imitations are a currency of friendship, like the play fighting of animals (Bateson, 1956;
Bekoff & Byers, 1998), which appears to be associated with expressions of emotion joy (Panksepp
& Burgdorf, 2003).
All who have carefully followed the progress of music making from infancy have been
impressed with the importance of genuine companionship from adults or older children for
encouragement of musical inventiveness and the development of the singing voice or the ability to
manipulate rhythms, tones and melodies of human made sound. The extraordinary capacities of
very young babies for listening with musical discrimination (Flohr et al., 2000) become harnessed
to the task of guiding a toddler's newly acquired movements for making and controlling such
sounds, and for sensing better in their bodies how it would feel to make music and dance like big
people.
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The Norwegian musicologist Jon-Roar Bjorkvold, in his book The Muse Within (Bjorkvold,
1992) used his training to observe closely the musical games of children in Oslo, Moscow and St
Petersberg, and Los Angeles. The three countries approached the education of children in very
different ways and still do. He asked, "To what extent is there a common child culture irrespective
of these enormous cultural, social and political differences?" He took a forthright position: "Our
Western conception of music includes an aesthetic dimension that controls our selective perception;
it functions as a kind of subjective filtering mechanism. This aesthetic dimension, which among
other things includes norms regarding pitch and tonality, is totally foreign to child culture. Nor does
this concept of music, rooted as it is in the classical tradition, capture the sense of functional and
expressive unity that is the warp and woof of the spontaneous singing of children" (Bjorkvold,
1992, p. 47). He noted that the Western concept of music separated from other dynamic expressions
of human culture is not understood, or recognised in the languages, of many parts of the world,
notably in Africa where music permeates all life activities. He insists, "It is critically important for
children to master spontaneous singing, for it is part of the common code of child culture that gives
them a special key to expression and human growth. This kind of singing, which springs forth
without adult encouragement and is therefore spontaneous, is governed, like all other facets of play,
by child culture's norms and rules in both use and form" (Bjorkvold, 1992, p. 63).
Bjorkvold charted three ways infants and young children use the voice with a singing kind of
expression. Fluid/amorphous songs "evolve in a completely natural way from the infant's babbling
as part of its first playful experiments with voice and sound. This type of song, with its fanciful
glissandi, micro-intervals, and free rhythms, is quite different from what we adults traditionally
identify as song" (Bjorkvold, 1992, p. 65). Song formulas, which as teasing songs, for example,
assume symbolic forms are for communicating with other children and they flourish after the child
begins to play with peers, typically at two or three years. Bradley (in preparation) has found
something like a primitive form of this invented between infants under one year when they are left
on their own in trios. Elements of musically more complex standard songs are picked up from play
with adults and hearing them sing very early and soon are adapted to fit what the infant is doing, so
they can appear surprisingly early.
“Children do not burn their bridges as they enter new territories in their ongoing conquest of the
world. Their bold exploration of the new presupposes a secure footing in the old and familiar. The
spontaneous singing of a six-year old, therefore, includes all three song types. Only an expressive
vocabulary that includes all three song types...is adequate to the whole range of children's
emotional, communicational, and social needs" (Bjorkvold. 1992. p. 68). The relation of forms of
child musicality to communication with language is clear "Modern language research has identified
the following as the main functions of human speech generally: creating contact, communicating
information, and making identity. These three functional areas...are clearly evident in the
spontaneous singing of children" (Bjorkvold. 1992, p. 80). "The significance of such singing for
socialization, identity, cognitive development, communicative ability and general human growth
holds not only for children throughout the world, but for all oral and muse-ical folk cultures. Thus,
we are dealing here with universals that are not only transitional, but transgenerational, for folk
cultures include people of all ages" (Bjorkvold, 1992, p. 81).
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Finally, Bjorkvold's observations taught him, as a musician and teacher of music, that, "A child
who is asked to play a printed score must turn his attention from the primary experience of making
music (spontaneous singing within the child culture, for example) to a kind of secondary music
making in accordance with the notes on the page. For many children, the result is that their ability to
make music in the primary sense withers and dies. Children studying Suzuki violin often encounter
reluctance and difficulty with reading music after spending their early years learning their music by
rote and without music. Nothing comparable occurs in the case of language: children's encounter
with the alphabet does not rob them of their oral competence (though it can influence to some
extend the way they speak the language). Their oral musical competence, however, “can be
irretrievably lost as a result of premature preoccupation with written music" (Bjorkvold, 1992, p.
188).
Mechthild Papousek (1996) describes, with detailed acoustic graphs and musical analysis of
parent-infant vocal exchanges, how early phonation and cooing, exploratory vocal play, babbling,
variegated babbling and early words of the first year, may, with the engagement of parents, become
singing of songs. Mothers and fathers accurately reflect the infants expressions with the pitch,
melody, duration and rhythm of their vocalisations, as well as extending and embellishing them.
Universal temporal and expressive features of the infants sounds, and parents’ intuitive mimicry of
them to express different rousing or soothing intentions in regulating the infant's arousal show that
families from cultures with very different languages may have similar expressive forms or
emotional impulses. Vocal development of young children in terms of physiological characteristics,
vocalization/speech characteristics, and singing development is outlined in Musical Lives of Young
Children (Rutkowski & Trollinger, 2004, p. 83).
Music teachers who are familiar with the creativity of toddlers' spontaneous musicality can
perceive the bridge that must be crossed for a budding musician, for learning to read musical scores
and master an approved art tradition of singing or playing. The way is easier and learning more sure
if the teacher strives to be a companion in the enjoyment of moving with the subtleties of children's
musical invention and celebration (Custodero, 1998, 2002; Custodero & Johnson-Green, 2003;
Flohr, 2004; Hargreaves, 1996; Imberty, 1996; Littleton, 2002; Papousek, M. 1996; Sloboda &
Davidson, 1996; Trehub, 2002).
To understand this bridge of musicality between generations, and indeed between cultures, we
need to have an idea of how a human body may be moved to musical expression, and how people of
different ages and experience may move in musical sympathy.
MUSICALITY AND MOVING IN EARLY COMMUNICATION
Principles of Movement Science

"Understanding movement is central to understanding development. Without movement we -
by which I mean the animal kingdom - would not be able to eat, avoid harm, reproduce or
communicate by sound, gesture or facial expression. We would not be able to perceive, since
perception is an active process. Consequently we would not be able to think, because
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there would be nothing to think about. We would not even be able to breathe or pump nutrients
around the body. In short we would be dead" (Lee. 2005).
In spite of their differences in size, mobility and experience, a newborn infant and an adult
evidently share a matching time sense and the same affective values of moving. They engage one
another by hearing, sight and touch and regulate an exchange of states of interest, intention and
emotions with intuitive ease, exhibiting intricate synrhythmic activity (Trevarthen et ah, 2006;
Trevarthen & Reddy, 2006). How can we explain this? Apparently we need a scientific account of
how the actions of their communication become coordinated in mutual experience. But first we
have to understand how one animal, such as a person, can make their own movements effective as
actions with particular goals.
Modern movement science begins with the work of a Russian physiologist, Nicholas Bernstein
(1967), who discovered in the 1920s that animal movements are organised, not by assembly of
reflex reactions to stimuli, as Pavlov claimed, but from planned use of the body as an instrument for
relating to the world (Pickenhain, 1984). Their motor impulses will need perceptual guidance to fit
the circumstances in the body and in the world (Gibson, 1966), but they can arise with some
independence from sensory prompting, and can specify the goal to be achieved with the aid of
perception. Bernstein's research also clarified that the brain has an integrated capacity for
substituting one action for another to get a desired goal, a function called motor equivalence, also
recognised by the American psychologist Karl Lashley (1917, 1951). This needs a body image, of
what the body feels like in all sorts of movement.
Guiding a movement to it goal requires an efficient and automatic discrimination, in advance,
of the different effects inside the body that have to be perceived and controlled when activating
properly a very complex system of muscles and joints. Then the action has to be sent along the path
to the desired external goal. David Lee (2005) calls this 'gap closure', and he has made a
mathematical model, called tau theory, that accurately describes how all animals use their brains to
calculate, in advance, how to use the body and forces from events in the world to make single
actions efficient and effective as intended. Substituting one movement for another to get to a
particular goal needs a translation between two movement plans. The prospects of moving for each
have to be known and adapted to help reaching the same goal by different bodily means. Versatility
of movement plans is required for different ways of moving about in a cluttered world, or for
shifting strategies when dealing with an object that is being handled outside the body. All the
different movements and all the different ways of sensing their effects have to be coupled in one
sense of time, in the present and into the immediate future.
This describes the essential cerebral organisation of a Self, and its principles of operation are as
ancient as animal life (Merker, 2005). Conscious awareness and the acquired cognitive processes
that organise it are dependent on the unconscious creation of time images for movements
(Jeannerod, 2006; Sperry, 1952) and of how it feels to move (Damasio. 1999». Both the growing
cognitive powers of infants and their abilities to communicate are dependent on the initiation and
regulation by movements by these principles of prospective control, which are innate (Trevarthen,
1984; von Hofsten, 2004).
When intentions to move are communicated, i.e. passed between subjects — such as in the case
of the blind Swedish baby who, with her left hand, expressed the sound of her mother's singing,
matching the rhythm and melody of the music made by the mothers vocal activity
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with dancing of her hand - there has to be a way for the imitator to be in the role of (intend like) the
model agent. Matching standards of timing, shape of body and sense of energy for moving are
necessary (Trevarthen, 1986).
Pavlov's dogs were immobilised and subjected to stimuli not of their choice. In fact, they were
made to be inactive like human subjects usually are in modern brain scan research. Bernstein
(1967), however, used film analysis to study humans performing in free and natural ways many
tasks, from athletic locomotion to use of tools, and he made detailed biomechanical studies of how
the body masses were displaced with rhythmic ease. Modern research uses motion capture
technology to achieve higher resolution, but the method is the same.
Images of Others' Moving: The Rhythmic Cerebral Mechanism of Sympathy,

Active from Birth
It is interesting that a revolution in recent years of understanding concerning how adult human
brains are aware both of the feel of their own actions, and how they are conscious of the intentions,
experiences of other persons doing things and of their emotions, has come by functional brain
imaging in conditions where people observe films of other people that truly engage their active
conscious interest in spite of the enforced immobility of the situation in the scanner. The data show
that they are sympathising with the other people by tacit moving, i.e. by activating virtual motor
images of their own intentional system (Adolphs, 2003; Damasio, 1999; Gallese, 2003; Gallese et
ah, 2004; Jeannerod, 2006; Schilbach, et ah, 2006). For example, when a person is watching a
performance, or just listening to the sound of someone playing music or singing, parts of their brain
that would be active were they singing or performing become active, as if they were the agent. This
is called 'mirroring', but is a process of shared intentions and feelings that must be the foundation
for all of what is sometimes called imitative learning. It is clearly a complex psychological function
and it may involve very widespread activity of the brain, including, for example the basal ganglia
and the cerebellum outside the cerebral cortex. Its foundations are in the future-directed processes
that generate and guide movements.
A newborn baby cries, suckles or moves its face and limbs with the prospective motor control
of a single dynamic personality, using cerebral generation of time in moving, and the tau guide,
function to achieve effective actions (Craig & Lee, 1999). Babies hear human sounds, maybe all
sounds, not as pitches, harmonies and so on, how music psychologists categorise sounds of music,
but as expressions of the effort, affection, weakness or caution of human moving to make the
sounds, and immediately in relation to the motor patterns of their own subjectivity or self-
awareness. They have musical sympathy or an innate intersubjectivity for musicality in moving
(Trevarthen, 1999). They hear sequences of sounds made by other persons, not as notes in musical
measures or as phonological elements in words, or as words in phrases, but as minded gestures -
actions of moving agents who may sense and engage with their Self contingently and responsibly,
motivated by a matching time in the mind for moving and sensing (Wittman & Poppel, 1999).
________________________________________________________________________________
The infant's manifest sense of rhythm, phrasing and melody is attracted to the sounds, sights
and feel of human bodies, shaped like their own, and moving with expression like their own. Their
moving matches that of their affectionately attentive parents and to some extent the music in their
environment. They have inner visceral interoceptive and somatic proprioceptive senses of extended
time that lead them to express and detect narrative forms of fluctuating excitement, effort,
recognition and repose, and they anticipate experiences of recognisable quality at certain moments
in these cycles of acting, exploring and finding. Their life is conducted in body time, first sensitive
to the changes of needs through the day, not clock time. It seeks engagement with the natural vital
inner rhythms of other persons that harmonize with and support their own. This engagement of
rhythms is improvised between infant and adult in much the same way, and with remarkably similar
timing, as the playing of two jazz musicians improvising a duet (Schogler, 1999).
Researchers find that the mind's inner sense of agency imagines cycles of effort that cause
fluctuations in heart beat and breathing in cycles of about 30-40 seconds while a person is asleep
when the special identifying and recognizing senses are shut down and the mind dreams as a free
spirit pushed by autonomic cycles of agitation and repose, and sometimes recognizing remembered
events as if they are real (Delamont, Julu. & Jamal, 1999). This period, of about half a minute,
corresponds to the intuitive time of narratives in protoconversation with a two-month-old, or the
stanzas of a baby song shared with an older baby (Trevarthen. 1999). In the process of conscious,
waking action in the world, this inner narrative time of musicality becomes experienced time, full
of references to things discovered and describable, and linked to imagined action schemata
regulated by dynamic emotions. This is true for a baby and mother playing with sound (Stern,
1999), as for an adult experiencing or playing music (Imberty, 2000). As the baby becomes older
the stories of remembered moments in life (Stern, 2004) become linked in a line mode of
consciousness (Donaldson, 1992), and then a child can learn how to explain intentions, thoughts,
feelings and experiences in talk.
Language, the most elaborate and productive achievement of collective human action is not just
a structured system of phonological, lexical and syntactic or grammatical components or rules,
innate or learned. Its cognition rides, as music does, on metaphors and parables of embodied,
moving experience (Gallese & Lakoff, 2005; Lakoff & Johnson, 1980; Turner. 1996). The
metaphors that regulate even our most complexly rational thoughts are representations in the brain
of movements of the body, and especially movements of the hands (Goldin-Meadow & McNeill,
1999). Einstein reported that his mathematical inventions came to him as sensations of bodily
movement. The emotional qualities are carried especially in the voice, which reports the vital
movements or animus of breathing, and their elaborations for communicating with other subjects.
The brain of an infant that achieves this inter-modal or a-modal sensory appreciation of inner
moving is responsible for coordinating and regulating their own movements and for ordering their
own awareness in their own body, and for situating this consciousness in a world gradually
becoming filled with categories of experience. By the end of infancy the infant will be guided in
their awareness and intentions by a rapidly increasing set of discrete recollections or recognitions -
of objects, events, places, structures, action schemata, uni- modal experiences, and words. But the
primary rhythms of their waking actions and
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awareness, and of their expressions in communication, remains that which we have recognised in
infants as the Intrinsic Motive Pulse (IMP), the temporal foundation of intuitive musicality and the
foundation for relating sympathetically in time with the behaviours and expressions of other people
(Trevarthen, 1999). The young human mind is carried to cognition by an embodied sense of time,
by purpose and the changing quality of feelings in moving, estimating vitality affects in its self and
detecting them in other vital creatures, especially those that meet them with affection and joy in
human bodies (Stern, 1999; 2000). It is true that "music is the food of love", and much else
concerning human shared experience besides.
Steps, with Growing Body and Brain, To more Vigorous and more
Inventive Communication
Of course, there are great developments in the power of an infant and young child to move, in
their cognitive interpretations of experience and therefore in their goals and interests, and in their
appreciation of the meaning of other persons' actions. These developments result from growth of the
body and brain, as well as learning, and the emergence of new ways of moving, and new ways of
vocalising. At the same time, the basic timing and emotional evaluations of motor control, which
enabled intersubjective sympathy with parents and others from birth, do not change. The child's
innate musicality, their IMP, is merely exercised in different ways, using different body parts and
more intelligent discriminations.
The newborn can make small coos in a pulse of shallow, rapid breathing, and can hold the
breath for a few seconds or make very long and powerful cries punctuated by rhythmic sobbing,
sustaining oscillations between inspiration and expiration over long intervals. In a few weeks coos
are produced that may be articulated by glottal stops to make sounds which adults in different
countries call ah goo, an gu, ah ger, etc., and after about 3 months babies laugh. The timing of
infants' spontaneous vocalizations, for their own entertainment, indicates that they do not depend on
hearing the similar adult timing of syllables and phrases, and they can be demonstrated in the same
measures by infants who are deaf (Lynch et al., 1995). The precise engagements in dialogues of
protoconversation with adults, who intuitively facilitate with well-timed infant directed speech and
imitations of the infant's coos, indicate that infants sense how to engage and synchronise their
breathing and phonation with the movements that make syllables and phrases. They have a narrative
expectancy for the energy of vocalisation extending over tens of seconds.
The vocal system of an infant, the first musical instrument, undergoes rapid change in the first
six months after birth, and thereafter the larynx descends further as the body grows, lowering the
pitch range of the voice (Rutkowski & Trollinger, 2004). For the period of infancy the vocal cords
have less control than they will after that, and this limits singing types of vocalizations to simple
calls, which may be pitched to match the baby talk or singing sounds of a parent. After one year a
child plays with singing sounds before developing, with changes in both the vocal system and the
brain, the articulatory capacity that allows speaking clear and recognisable words (Menard,
Schwartz & Boe, 2004; Rutkowski & Trollinger,
________________________________________________________________________________
2004). Development of the most precise articulations at the front of the mouth continues with the
development of connected sentences of speech after the second year. Singing develops before
language, as it may well have done in human evolution (Cross & Moreley, in preparation; Mithen,
2005). All of these changes in vocal production and fluency are linked with developments in deep
subcortical parts of the human brain much transformed by evolution to make communication of
both musical and linguistic meanings possible (Donald. 2001; Lieberman, 2000). These changes are
also linked with development in the corticalised systems that mediate sympathetic awareness
between human bodies and their actions (Gallese & Lakoff, 2005).
The second stage in speech development is likely of special importance in relationship to the
babbling associated with musical development in that the “infants have gained control of producing
normal phonation with a vocal tract that is postured in a variety of ways and thus capable of
transmitting contrasts of vocalic quality.” (Oiler et al, 1997, p. 414). "Speech science research
concerned with infant vocalizations and pre-language toddlers indicates that sounds used in vocal
experimentation are initially reflexive, but via imitation and learning, the child gradually develops
vocal patterns that are appropriate to his or her culture." (Trollinger, 2004, p. 220-221). “Being that
pitched vocal sounds (generated by the larynx) in speech are produced the same way for singing in
young children (via the raising and lowering of the larynx), this awareness may contribute directly
to perceived and produced pitches in singing” (Trollinger, 2004, p. 221).
Moving, Being Moved and Musicality: Theory for Education of Musical Expression
The work of Emile Jaques-Dalcroze suggests how we should conceive music, emotion, and
movement as inseparable. He believed that humans feel emotions from various sensations produced
at different levels of intensity in muscular contraction and relaxation. Human emotions are
translated into musical motion, and hearing music we sense those emotions in various parts of the
body, and feel emotions corresponding to the various levels of muscular contraction and relaxation.
Recent neurological research confirms that the nervous system is richly integrated and that the
brain functions as a dynamic system transferring information at great speed, faster than research
techniques can track except locally in very limited regions, or for very short periods of time. This is
certainly true for the processes responsible for awareness or production of musical communication
(Turner & loannides, in preparation). Body and mind work in tight reciprocal coordination in the
generation of movements and consciousness.
Over one hundred years ago Emile Jaques-Dalcroze (commonly referred to as Dalcroze
observed how movement stimulates music learners and helps them feel the music. In answer to the
question of what gives music life and expression, he wrote, “Movement, rhythm. (Jaques-Dalcroze,
1921. p. 101). The sensation of contraction and relaxation in human: emotion is reflected in the
tension and release of the rhythmic movement of music in time and space. Both emotion and music
come about in movement. Dalcroze spoke of how there s "a gesture for every sound and a sound for
every gesture". We might add here that there is a
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gesture for every sound that corresponds to an emotion, and a sound for every gesture that evokes
an emotion.
The Dalcroze method for teaching music emphasizes the central importance of rhythm in
human life. Moving rhythmically is not about dancing or making pretty movements. Rhythm is the
'heartbeat' of music. The word rhythm is related to the Greek word rhythmos (measured flow or
change, through time, as in a river flowing). When a parent and child engage in rhythmic music
making the musical elements of pitch, rhythm, dynamic energy are in play. The dynamic energy of
music comes from movement, and corresponds to the way in which feelings are generated through
brain-generated time and space. Dalcroze defined rhythm as varieties of flow through time-space
(Jaques-Dalcroze, 1921). His idea of “flow” as a quality of live movement gives the word the same
sense as it has for Csikszentmihalyi in his descriptions of optimal experience (Csikszentmihalyi,
1990, 1997; Custodero, 2002).
Figure 1. Interrelationship of Music, Movement, and Emotion.
Kinesthesia, from the Greek, was adopted by physiological science in the 19th century to
designate awareness of movement. Howard Gardner identifies bodily kinesthetic as the sense that
guides fine and gross movement, and that aids the perception of musical motion and controls the
performing of music (Gardner, 1993, 1999). The Dalcroze teacher Robert Abramson calls
kinesthesia or kinesthetic sense the missing link between sound, movement and feeling (Choksy et
al., 2001), which accords with what is now known about the brain and human development. For
example, Parsons found that the cerebellum, the organ most concerned with kinesthetic regulations,
is activated in close coordination with areas of the cortex in music activity (Parsons & Fox, 1997).
Hetland has used the term rhythm theory to describe Parson’s module theory of music and spatial
tasks (Hetland, 2000). The rhythmic elements of music (hence rhythm theory) controlled in the
cerebellum and cerebral cortex are transformed with increasing ability following exercise in the
performance of specific mental tasks. There can be no musicality without the innate source of time
for rhythms of movement and an emotional appreciation of effort and grace in making movement.
The perception of sounds made by the human body moving is also constrained by innate parameters
or hearing that detect levels of effort in pitch, loudness and timbre or harmony (Flohr & Hodges,
2006).
A primary function of musical performance is to express emotions to others. All music begins
with movement, and all music has a social function. Movement is excited by emotion
________________________________________________________________________________
and by the sharing of emotion. Music with good, well-regulated, rhythmic motion brings emotion
to life in an audience. In his method Dalcroze categorizes the qualities of musical performance into
three general types. Arythmic performance is spastic and offbeat. Errythmic performance has all the
notes in the right place, but is dull and tedious, lacking nuance of weight, motion, and time.
Eurythmic performance balances motion and rhythm and solves the problem of how to make music
move so that the audience and performer are emotionally moved. To perform in a eurythmic way
the musician must be able to control her/his tendency to perform in an errythmic, synchronized
way, without expression. Errythmic performance — placing all the right notes in the right places
but without rhythmic movement and hence without feeling - is analogous to a philosophy of young
children’s music development that does not taking into consideration the natural social interactions
with caregivers and teachers, and the emotions they share. The infant’s intrinsic musicality of
movement and communication, in a mood of contended liveliness, has a natural regularity of
impulse and sympathetic style that may be called 'eurythmic'.
MUSIC AND THE PSYCHOBIOLOGY OF A CHILD'S BRAIN

We commonly use 'the brain' as a metaphor for our theories of what governs our life and that of
other people. This is increasingly so in a scientific culture that expects revelations of reality by
intricate esoteric methods of investigation of nature. Unfortunately attention to detail and the
complex methods used to gain information about the human organism-about genetics, nerve
connections, brain functions and behaviour—means that an overall understanding of the brain-
mind, one that relates to common sense of parents and teachers regarding how children have
evolved to develop and what they need, the reality we live in, is confused. The pace of
technological development in brain science is so fast that there is no time to correct errors of over
simplification, and educational policies are often misguided by part truths. Moreover, as with all
large, complex cultures, there is an emphasis in our education on what a child has to learn to
become socially skilled. Just growing up in collaborative company is no longer enough. To explain
how children learn music we must do our best to balance evidence for cerebral plasticity or changes
in brain growth and function consequent upon special experience or practice, against a more general
understanding of cerebral functional elasticity—the adaptive information—seeking actions of the
developing child and his or her brain, and how these actions respond to encouragement and
'scaffolding from teachers and lead to the changes in the brain that increase awareness and skill. We
need a broad psychobiological perspective.
In 150 years of developmental science it has been revealed that brain and body grow together-
maps of the body interwoven in nerve tissues to regulate action and to deliberately seek awareness
that can guide moving, learning to perceive more to move more effectively. The body is mapped in
the brain from embryo stages, and a foetus moves with coordinated integrity (Trevarthen, 2004).
This moving is generated with rhythms that anticipate how the body will become effectively
mobile, manipulative and expressive, and all the braingenerated moving and perceiving is coupled
to non-nervous hormonal regulations of the
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body's vital inner functions. The dualistic idea of a separate mind and body, although still a
prevalent belief, is no longer valid.
At a very early stage, just past mid gestation, the foetus has capacities for perceiving and
learning sounds. The human brain has, at this stage, a cerebral cortex that is much larger in
proportion to the body and the rest of the brain than in other mammals, including apes, and the size
and growth cycle of the human neocortex correlates with the relatively long life of a human being.
It is a tissue adapted to change in interaction with information from the body and from the outside
world, especially the social world (Freeman, 2000). It augments motives that are generated in the
brain as a whole with rules for action and images of experience stored in memory.
We have clear evidence that the brain tissues in and memory storing regions gain functional
power and change in morphology as a result of stimulation and use (Johnson, 2005). But it is
important to add that every change in cortical function has two causes-the incoming evidence of the
environment from the senses and the activating or motivating input from core brain systems beneath
the cortex that seek and validate this sensory evidence. The integrated subject or Self has to be
'interested', or the cortex will not learn. The developmental structures of the mind are self-
regulatory as they learn (Ciccheti & Tucker, 1994).
In reviewing how the development of a young child's brain can be related to learning music we
must, therefore, ask what is known about the motivating/emotional mechanisms, how they might
facilitate adaptive change in the cortex due to practice, and especially how they respond to the
motivations and emotions of other persons who would be teachers. We also must try to understand
how any development in cortical function might be expressed in a more acute awareness of music,
or new skill in the making of music. The natural foundation of music in song indicates that we
should focus first on the brain/body mechanisms of breathing, vocalization and of hearing, and then
we have to address the question of how the rhythmic and melodic expressions of the voice might be
related to dancing of the body and the skilfully controlled gestures required to play a musical
instrument according to the conventions of a particular musical culture. Here we can only do this in
a summary fashion.
We limit our concern to the beginnings of musical awareness and musicality in moving before a
child's brain is old enough to be the intelligent organ of a musician who knows how to recognise
and name tones, scales, harmonies, phrases, melodies, and so on, and to read the notation of a
musical score and turn it into beautiful sound by beating a drum or bell, moving a bow, plucking a
string or fingering a keyboard. Recent developmental psychology research, summarised above,
demonstrates that awareness of music has very strong origins in motives and mechanisms for
communication that are active and important in a child's development from birth. Communicative
musicality comes before language and serves as a support for learning how to use words. It also is a
bridge over which other complex cultural skills, including being a singer or musician, can be
transferred. Human brains in human bodies grow musically intelligent together, the elder ones
adapted to join with the motives of the younger.
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Embryogenic Motives and Awareness of Moving

Before the animal’s brain is active as the coordinating centre of conscious mobile life, its
intricate cell-linking networks are formed within many tissue arrays that chart the animal s body,
with its symmetry and in alignment with the polarity of the animal s fate for swimming, walking or
flying in the media and light, sounds, heat and shadows of the world and in resistance to the
gravitational pull of the earth. The first neurons to carry messages that will mediate between these
maps of the central nervous system and the body are those that excite muscles - the motor neurons
that control moving. The integrative systems of the brain core are already prepared to give the
whole a coherence in time and a polarised purposefulness — a rhythm of action and a directed
future sense. These are the affective or emotional neurons that will also regulate energy in moving
in balance with vital needs of the body and the risks and benefits of action (Trevarthen, 2004;
Trevarthen et ah, 2006; Panksepp & Trevarthen, in prep.). They include visceral efferent neurons
that control the vital organs, including the heart and lungs, and that move the muscles of the eyes,
face, mouth and throat, which become the main organs of communication. Hands are coupled to this
expressive system by a unique development in humans. No other species can express so much of
intentions and feelings by movements of the forelimbs.
Head, eyes and hands can listen, look and feel independently of the body as a whole, to select
goals for future action, and they become of key importance in communication because they signal
what a person is going to do, what interests them. Among the earliest perceptual systems to be
active are those evolved to sense movement within the body (kinesthetically and proprioceptively)
or in relation to the medium through which the animal is moving (exproprioceptively), and these
include vestibular senses of displacement of the head, and hearing.
The movement controlling system of the brain rhythmic in its excitatory activity from the start,
and it develops by responding to the sensory evidence of movement, selecting most effective
regulations for holding the body in coherent activity, for engagement with the world and for
maintaining the functions of the whole body in a vital state, protecting from injury and collecting
the energy needed for action. Brain and body grow together as a going concern', anticipating
adventures in action.
The human brain is built to move the human body. It learns from the body, and it teaches the
body how to deal with forces that arise in itself when it is moving, and how to pick up information
from the environment to guide moving to anticipated goals as one subject or Self. This Self
becomes the source of intentions and of perceptions that change with experience, and its actions and
expressive movements are the only signals that Other Selves can use to understand what is going on
in its brain. All this adventurous, time-regulated activity, with its emotional passions, sets the
foundations for the special human dynamics of music.
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Tension and Tone in the Core of the Brain: The Start of Emotions for Knowledge and its
Communication
In the motivating brain are formed seeking impulses that prompt the subject to gain new
experiences. Out of these a unified consciousness is built up in which one time and space for many
movements is represented, and the uses of many kinds of object are perceived. The neurochemical
processes of emotion in the brain (Panksepp, 1998) are in communication with hormonal systems
that link the body's vital needs with actions directed to satisfy or protect them. Emotions generated
in the periaqueductal grey matter of the midbrain and integrated with experience in limbic cortex
and amygdala, evaluate and regulate moving, and give values to places and objects the brain has
learned to appreciate in relation to needs of the body. Thus every perceived thing or action that is
remembered has an emotional 'colour' or quality as well as a cognitive or performative structure and
form. The perception of the timbre of the voice or the musical sounds of instruments engages this
core system of emotional values.
The neocortex assimilates a lifetime of information about how to move in and exploit the
resources of surroundings. Its expectations are determined by the motivating systems of the brain
stem. The limbic system, especially the hippocampus, grows as new motive and emotional controls
are learned, activating the retentive tissues of the sensory and motor systems of the neocortex and
mediating memory.
As intelligence and behaviour of animals selves have increased in complexity and daring, their
brains have evolved systems of imagination, thought and emotion that seek to communicate and
grow with other brains, creating adaptive social intelligence. The only way for functions of one
brain to influence and collaborate with another is through body talkusing the body so other bodies
can divine messages about intentions, attentions and feelings. The brain-to-brain activity mediated
by expressive body movements started to evolve with the earliest animals that had brains-even
when the brain was no more than a nerve net distributed throughout body of a jellyfish,
interconnecting its organs of mobility and sensitivity to stimuli.
Human brains link human bodies with uniquely elaborate complexity of movements and
senses. A long gestation permits the elaboration, in a protected environment, of a mutual
amphoteronomic regulation of vital functions, preparing for a life with human sense of time and
human emotions. After birth, the mother and other caregivers and companions, provide the infant
with psychological company and guide development of new awareness and new ways of acting.
They meet with mutual understanding or sympathy, sharing the same parameters of human
synrythmia (Trevarthen et al, 2006). All this collaborative brain-body living depends on sharing of
the time and expressive form and style of movements.
Time in the Mind: The Growth 0f Sympathetic Rhythms and Musical Imagination
Before and After Birth
The brain is, in a sense, musical before birth, formed to put rhythmic impulses into movements
of the body, and for using the body to communicate these impulses and to sense
________________________________________________________________________________
them in others. The first muscle activity the central nervous system excites in the embryo has
rhythmical timing, before the body sends any sensations to drive it. The senses of touch, vibration
and hearing come early in development. The foetus hears musical elements in the voice of the
mother months before birth (usually around the 26th week), and sometimes it reacts to the rhythm of
music, kicking with its legs. It has well-formed eyes, face, mouth, lips and tongue, vestibular
system and cochlear, as well as motor organs for breath and voice and hands for gesture, inactive in
their confinement, waiting for the freedom to move that will be granted at birth. When the foetus
starts to hear and learn his or her mother's voice, the neocortex is just beginning to form. Its
primary networks for for seeing undergo growth and organizational changes in the first 6 months
after birth. The networks for hearing, which begin to be effective before birth, have a second burst
of development after infancy, when the sounds of objects being manipulated and of the speech of
other persons become important.
Through childhood to adolescence many formulae for motor skills and patterns for identifying
sights, sounds and touch experiences that relate to the execution of new skills are incorporated in
neocortical maps representing the eyes, vocal system and hands. But recollection of these
experiences depends upon how the whole body is motivated to move and on the affective
assessment of circumstances. These subjective functions of the mind are regulated to a large extent
outside the neocortex, in the more irregularly textured archeocortex and limbic cortex, which
function with the subcortical structures of the brain stem (MacLean, 1990).
Regulations of the rhythms of life have evolved in and grow in the neuro-chemically complex
interneuronal core of the spinal cord and brain stem, the basal ganglia, the cerebellum and limbic
system which are coupled by way of the hypothalamus to the pituitary and adrenal glands that
secrete hormonal messages that circulate in the blood to all organs of the body. The cerebellum, as
prime coordinator of the intricacies of motor activity of all the body and precise timing of
movements, with more neurons than the cerebral cortex, develops throughout life, but most
conspicuously through early childhood to adolescence, as the body grows in size and power and
skills are practiced and retained. It is greatly involved in both the hearing and performance of
music.
The cerebral neocortex has evolved as a supremely adaptive tissue to record and organise
impressions from the senses and to give refinement to commands the muscles, always under the
direction of impulses from the subcortical brain. This dependency of neocortex on the subcortex is
clear in the way the cortex forms in the foetus (Trevarthen, 2004), and how its circuits change in
readiness for, and response to, the world after birth. New connections and transmission complexes
are set up in the developing brain under the dual influence of environmental input regulated by
movements, and of internal core activity of the subcortical Intrinsic Motive Formation (IMF)
(Trevarthen & Aitken, 1994).
From 6 weeks, when the neurons of the cerebral cortex are completing the post-natal
proliferation of dendritic branches, and the production of synaptic connections is accelerating, a
baby will orient strongly to a parent's eyes as they join in turn-taking utterances of
protoconversation, coordinating coos, prespeech lip and tongue movements, and hand gesture.
Protoconversation has a pulse interval approximating to adagio (c. 0.9 sL and the infant's
vocalizations are organized in syllables (0.2-0.5 s, with phrase-final lengthening), and phrases (3-5
s) (Lynch et ah, 1995; Malloch, 1999; Trevarthen. 1999
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These motor times of dialogue (Jasnow and Felstein, 1986) persist as cross-culturally optimal
rhythmic units in poetry and music (Miall & Dissanayake, 2003; Poppel & Wittmann, 1999). The
baby is attracted to the whole constellation of maternal expressions; for example, fixating a mother's
eyes more strongly when she vocalizes, or watching her lips to better discriminate her vocal sounds.
The neural mechanisms of the hemispheres that mediate this interpersonal awareness appear to be
configured approximately as in the adult brain, and they are asymmetric. When the
electroencephalic (EEG) activity of an 8-week-old baby was mapped while the infant was looking
at a picture of a woman's face, researchers were surprised to discover that the face recognizing area
in the right hemisphere, and both Broca's and Wernicke's areas in the left hemisphere, identified in
adults respectively with speaking and hearing speech, were more active than other parts of the
cortex (Tzourio-Mazoyer et al., 2002).
From 3 to 4 months infants amuse themselves with rhythmically moving their bodies, waving
limbs, banging objects, clapping hands. Game routines are practiced with companions, confirming
favorite action and affect formats or emotional narratives (Ratner & Bruner, 1978). Utterances and
expressive movements are repeated with the 3- to 5-second cycle of the prelinguistic phrase, which
has a variety of lively and communicative prosodic contours (Malloch, 1999; Stern, 1999). Phrases
of baby songs are frequently grouped in stanzas of four lines, lasting 15 to 30 seconds. These are
foundations, generated in the brain, for the syntactic rules of language vocal imitation and vocal
play when the infant is alone are more obvious and more varied at 3 to 5 months. The baby is
experimenting with a growing larynx (Rutkowski & Trollinger, 2004).
In the babbling period, after 6 months, when the infant begins to imitate more elaborate
gestures and speech sounds, vowels are inflected in syllables, and frontal consonants are
differentiated (Bates & Dick, 2002; Locke, 1993). The infant's vocalizations show the influence of
distinctive phonological features of the maternal language from around 6 months. Babbling and
hand banging are rhythmic, both repeating up to about 3 pulses per second. These movements may
be demonstrated to others as communicative signals and shown off with pride to appreciative others
(Trevarthen, 2002). Infants from right-handed families, given a choice at 5 to 6 months, prefer to
look at the right of two screens to attend to the matching of the appearance and sound of speech
syllables (MacKain et al., 1983). This confirms evoked potential studies that indicate left-
hemisphere dominance for hearing speech at this age; the right hemisphere perceives other sounds,
including the affective tones of speech, better. Babbling also shows an asymmetry suggesting left
hemisphere specialization for expressive vocalization of this articulate kind (Holowka & Petitto,
2002). These hemispheric asymmetries may have significance for the asymmetry that has been
reported for acquiring more articulate aspects of musical performance by the left hemisphere, the
right hemisphere appearing to be more active in responding to the prosody of emotion in musical
sound. There are sex differences in these asymmetries indicating that males, which develop more
slowly than females, also have a more marked asymmetry for both verbal and musical articulation
and the processing of speech and musical sounds (Falk, 2000).
At 9 months purposeful sharing of interest in what can be done with objects appears
(Trevarthen & Flubley, 1978). Infants start to deliberately look and point to indicate a direction of
attention and show signs of wanting to participate in the attentions and intentions
________________________________________________________________________________
that familiar partners address to objects by following their gaze or pointing (Bates & Dick, 2002;
Bruner, 1983; Carpenter et ah, 1998). A baby may know his or her name before 6 months, but at 1
year awareness of others' behavior has transformed and infants now may spontaneously copy
arbitrary conventional meanings of expressions, manners, actions, and roles; and they are attracted
to objects that others use and identify as special. Vocal or gestural approximations to words in the
maternal language emerge within 'acting to mean' after 9 months (Bruner, 1983; Halliday, 1979). At
1 year an infant may comprehend 40 to 100 words and produce up to 20. The early vocabulary
reflects both differences in motives of children and the style and speech of older companions,
especially, in most cases, the mother. Some children acquire names for objects and actions on
objects first, others use interpersonal, social and self-referred phrases more (Barrett, 1981). Again,
comparisons may be made to differences in singing or attending to music that depend on how the
activities of the infant are responded to and encouraged by adult companions. With exceptional
support in learning the drill a one year old may beat a regular tempo. It has been claimed that this
ability is uniquely human, and an important foundation for learning the ritual forms of music
(Wallin, Merker & Brown, 2000).
A rapid explosion of vocabulary starts about 20 to 30 months after birth, but there are large
individual differences in this learning (Bates & Dick, 2002; Locke, 1993). The child has little
comprehension of regular syntax or grammar but does make use of elaborate prosody and
coordinated sequences of voicing and expression that indicate the possession of regulators of
rhythm, serial order, and self-conscious emotions. The language that appears in the first 2 years
depends upon the linguistic environment. The brain responds differently for the learned language
and another language. A study of 18 very young babies showed no brain activity differences while
listening to native language and foreign language sounds. After a few months native and foreign
language stimuli produced a difference in left hemisphere EEG activity (Cheour, 1998). In addition,
research concerning bilingualism demonstrated that the temporal lobes and temporoparietal cortex
of the brain are more activated while listening to stories in one’s native language (Perani et
al„ 1998). Deaf or hearing children with deaf signing parents learn sign language (Goldin-Meadow
& McNeill, 1999; Petitto et ah. 2002). These developments have been considered as relevant to the
development of musical skills, but it is not likely that musical learning depends on a mechanism
adapted for learning speech.
A Brain for Music First, and then Language

The brain mechanisms for music and language appear from recent research to be comparable in
general organisation. Why is this so? What are the tasks they share?
Music, like language, develops for communication, and by communication. Both depend upon
functions of the brain that engage and regulate expressive movements of the body, thai guide these
movements by senses that monitor the active Self, and that detect expressions of other persons. Both
require the Self to be in command of a coherent conscious intention^ agency, and an intersubjective
consciousness that can detect intentions, interests and feelings of other persons. Language and
music are for the community. They participate in the regulation of interpersonal relationships, in the
creation and remembering of habits and
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rituals by which people cooperate in a society that has many traditions and cultural tools. Of course,
both have a vital role in teaching the young, though music in our literate culture is much
undervalued as a tool of education. Though individuals may practice what they have learned alone,
all the learning of music and language is for social use.
Language is elaborated, with many technical aids derived from writing and from recordings of
the voice and gestures of its use, to define, describe, interpret, remember and store shared
experiences identified in detail. It is elaborately cognitive and its use involves complex sequences
of movement that articulate vocal and gestural messages to distribute attentions and intentional
movements in ways that other persons can pick up and reflect upon as if they were their own.
Music does not tell anything specific about the shared world of meaningful actions places,
things and events in this way. It expresses the motives and feelings of communication itself with an
appeal that bridge the gaps of experience between people alive together in more direct and emotive
ways than talking or the distribution of texts. It expresses the motives and feelings of
communication itself, with little or no reference to another topic. It is essentially interpersonal, not
via extra personal objects, events or occasions.
But music is not just a rule-governed set of discrete audible events corresponding to an
arbitrary sequence of motor impulses-it is motivated to tell stories. It carries in its phrases and
episodes a purposeful and moving narrative of human intentions and emotions, linking the rhythmic
sequences of expressive movement in sound with transitions of emotion that make a kind of
dramatic sense, that build expectations, that transform mood and that may leave unforgettable
memories of what has happened, what should happen, and how the adventure should end. Thus
music, with dance and drama, can make human messages with mimetic force, even though they
refer to nothing real in the world outside human action. They give action itself meaning and create
the foundations for rituals of practice, including the syntactic rituals that enable language to have
persuasive and predictable illocutionary force. In development, musical and poetic messages guide
relationships and the sharing of experience before language. A baby engages with other persons
without language by movements and perceptions that make a universal foundation for the practiced
performances and conventional sound systems of any culture's music. For these functions of human
community and the transmission of the collective cultural knowledge, a human brain has two
capacities developed beyond any faculties in the brains of other animals.
Why only Human Brains are Musical

The systems for moving the body, for sensing body movements, and for regulating action and
awareness by emotions are exceptionally elaborate at birth. Indeed, both the human body and the
human brain have new specialisations for communication clearly defined months before birth, in the
foetus (Trevarthen, 2001).
Secondly, the human brain has an exceptionally long postnatal development and a great
capacity, in a vast system of cerebellar neurons and a greatly enlarged cerebral neocortex, for
'plastic' (but not passive) response to experience-to trace a personal narrative of experience that will
serve to guide future creative action (Merker, 2005). This capacity for learning
________________________________________________________________________________
arbitrary skills of cognitive awareness and motor performance depends on the prenatally built
systems of sensory reception and selection, of motor expression, and of motivation for seeking new
ways of engaging with the world—the Self that regulates complex problems of
mobility in a coherent way (Merker, 2003).
The world a newborn infant starts to learn with deliberate intent includes not only its own
body, which grows for several decades and changes in size, strength and delicacy of action
throughout life, but the body and behaviour of the mother and other human beings. The Selflearning
of the body is, from the start, profoundly attracted and influenced by the movements of other
persons' bodies, and the detection of their motives and emotions by all sensory means. This is an
innate process of detection by sympathy for the dynamic motivations that control human movement,
and for the display of movements through the human body in obedience to different states of mind.
The direct intersubjective 'attunement' of the child's mind to rhythmic and expressive variables of
moving in other humans requires no theory of mind', and must be an essential foundation for any
such theory, should it develop later as an explanatory system in a more sophisticated and
interpretative communication (Trevarthen, 1998; Stern, 2000). The mother's voice detected weeks
before birth becomes a bridge linking the emotional self-state-regulating amphoteronomic functions
and the synrythmic communication of conscious states between her and her baby after birth. Thus
the song of attachment is created (Panksepp & Bematzky, 2002).
In early weeks after birth infants listen to the sound patterns made by human bodies moving,
both internally (as expressed by vocal sounds) and through action on and displacement of objects
with different acoustic affordances (changing pitches, loudness and harmonic composition or
timbre). The infant is born into a human world of rhythmic sound full of the qualities of human
purposes and feelings, and the usable physics of spaces and things.
Babies express their feelings by rhythmic and sustained vocalisations and by rhythmic gestures
of different rapidity and intensity-their expressions obey principles of prospective control with
distinctive parameters of power, dynamics and texture or gracefulness that facilitate detection of
underlying motives. The expressions of parents have instincthe regulation that is adapted to aid
communication with the infant. The infant's learning is self- motivated and supported by the
knowing guidance of intuitive parenting. Thus the ground is laid for the learning of an infinite
variety of culturally contrived forms of expression and message making, include those we
understand to be music.
Musicality and the Two Most Intense Times of Social Learning

The human cerebral cortex is in its most rapid phase of growth and most intense activir. in the
first 3 years when the child is hopefully seeking new friends to share knowledge an^ skills, and this
growth slows after 5 years. Differentiation of the fine circuitry of the cortex is most intense around
the time school starts, between 5 and 7 years. Temporal-frontal connections in the left hemisphere
appear to be strengthening between 2 and 5 years, the period of most rapid language learning.
Before that, the pyramidal cells of area 44 of the left frontal lobe (Broca's area) develop more basal
dendrites between 18 and 36 months, as
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syllable and word combinations are learned, and as the child stabilizes hand preference for
meaningful or conventional acts (Pulvermuller & Schumann, 1994).
The young child is eagerly communicative, perceiving and reacting to the messages in
movements of other persons' bodies, learning their languages faster than at any other time of life.
The young brain is by no means a passive receptacle for this information; indeed more docile
learning begins after this more exuberant period. That is why mirroring and plasticity are not
wholly adequate metaphors for the way knowledge grows. Rather the child's mind system is elastic,
stretching to accommodate a flood of experiences and working them into concepts and habits with
useful shapes. From the first, imitations are a way to test and change other persons' expressions or
actions, not simply reproductions of movements. The parts of the brain that grow large and learn
most are those that represent most elaborately both the powers of movement and sensation of the
distal parts of the body and the emotions of action and discovery. Their development is by luxuriant
production of tissues that then become more ordered as they assimilate and imagine, or think about,
what has been learned (Hobson, 2002).
There is evidence for many age-related periods of rapid change when new kinds of connections
are made among action and experience (Trevarthen & Aitken, 2003). EEG coherence studies show
that different cortico-cortical tracts linking pairs of locations in the cortex are changing in their
efficiency at particular ages, and comparisons between locations in the two hemispheres indicate
that cycles of development swing from left to right cortex throughout childhood (Thatcher, 1994).
At first, when the infant’s body is weak and the most effective activities are the emotion-
communicative ones of the face, voice and hands responsive to matching states in other persons, the
right hemisphere is most active. At three times-in infancy, the preschool period and adolescence-
adjustments are made to new companions, new conventions of behaviour are negotiated and the
vitality of interpersonal life is most intense. It seems that at these times the consciousness and
emotions of the right hemisphere are more in use than those of the left (Schore, 1994; Siegel, 1999).
They are also times of increased musicality, when the voice, gesture and dance of spontaneous
expression are seeking rhythmic company and testing the limits of their range of activity with
varied intensity, practicing eurhythmia with new resources. New manners, new interests and new
languages are acquired.
The correlations between age related changes in ability to acquire fluency and accurate
pronunciation in a second language and developments in recognition of individuals from their face
or voice suggest that adolescence, like early childhood, is a period of enhanced cerebral adaptation,
of motivation for identification of significant social partners and for learning new conventions of
communication. Facial recognition, voice recognition, and tonal memory mature at about 7 to 9
years of age, and then there is a dip in this ability at puberty, between 11 and 15 years, and a second
period of enhanced ability for a few years after that. The distinctive intonation of a foreign language
is learned best by a child between 7 and 8 years, and significantly worse at 11 to 12 (Pulvermuller
& Schumann, 1994). The expressive arts, including music and dance, are also more easily learned
before puberty. All this can be regarded as a repeat of the toddlers' adventurous play with friends,
when Bjorkvold's "children's musical culture" flourishes.
________________________________________________________________________________
DEVELOPMENTALLY APPROPRIATE
MUSIC EDUCATION PEDAGOGY
Determining the best possible music pedagogy for children is a complex task. There exist many
theories and what may work well for one child may not work well for another child because
individual differences in children are the rule rather than the exception. Many writers propose
theories and ideas about music development and music education (for example Bamberger, 1991;
Gordon, 1997; Hargreaves, 1986; Holgersen & Fink-Jensen, 2002; Moog, 1976; Sloboda, 1985;
Swanick & Tilman, 1986; Zimmerman, 1982)3. Writers often apply theories such as those of Piaget
or Merleau-Ponty to music education pedagogy. Other writers focus on research to determine
specific events in development. The major roadblock to determining the best possible music
pedagogy is that educators currently do not have an overarching or meta-theory of music learning
that is readily accepted. Research advances on learning and the brain in the past 10-15 years provide
clues. Solms writes that there is agreement among developmental neurobiologists about how early
experiences influence brain connection patterns, especially between mother and infant (Solms,
2006). The influence of early experiences on the brain may fundamentally shape future personality
and mental health. However, while brain research has made large advances, it is difficult to find a
neurologist willing to suggest that our present level of understanding of the brain and learning is
sufficient to provide major changes to music education pedagogy.
A solution to the complex task of determining the best possible pedagogy for young children is
offered by the United States association for children K-8 years, the National Association for the
Education of Young Children (NAEYC). The NAEYC position statement document comments on
general development includes “Because development and learning are so complex, no one theory is
sufficient to explain these phenomena" (NAEYC, 1997). There are, however, principles that inform
practice. NAEYC uses the term developmentally appropriate practice to describe practices based
on principles about development, learning, characteristics of individual children, and knowledge of
the social and cultural contexts in which the children live. The broad-based review of the literature
on early childhood education by the NAEYC generates twelve principles to inform early childhood
practice. Several of the NAEYC principles are particularly relevant to this chapter in the way in
which the principles align with emotion, music, and a child-centered approach.
1. Children develop and learn best in the context of a community where they are safe and
valued, their physical needs are met, and they feel psychologically secure. In addition,
children’s development in all areas is influenced by their ability to establish and maintain a
limited number of positive, consistent primary relationships with adults and other children.
2. Domains of children’s development—physical, social, emotional, and cognitive—are
closely related. Development in one domain influences and is influenced by development in
other domains.
3
For more information the reader is directed to theories, ideas, and other developmental topics
reviewed in Flohr (2004) chapter 3 and tables 3.1 and 3.2.
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3 Play is an important vehicle for children’s social, emotional, and cognitive development, as
well as a reflection of their development.
4 Children are active learners, drawing on direct physical and social experience as well as
culturally transmitted knowledge to construct their own understandings of the world
around them. (NAEYC, 1997)
Music and movement experiences address social and emotional needs of children. Adult and
infant play with singing, rhythms, and clapping provide a primary social bonding that influence
development in the physical, social, emotional, and cognitive domains.
Music Aptitude or Ability
We have presented evidence for an innate 'communicative musicality' generated by intrinsic

properties of the growing human brain and responsive in its development to the rhythms and
expressions in the movements of other humans. There is a history of controversy regarding
definitions, measurement, and the implications of music ability (Boyle, 1992). Many related terms
such as music aptitude, intelligence, capacity, talent, sensitivity, musicality, and achievement are
used in describing music ability. Runfola and Swanwick (2002) note a current use of the term music
aptitude. In the 1930s the term in use was musical talent and in subsequent years other terms found
popularity. Colwell suggests that it may be best to think about music aptitude, talent, ability,
musicality, and related terms as comparable (Colwell, 2002). For the purposes of this chapter music
aptitude is defined as the child’s potential for learning music. Musical ability is defined as “what a
person is able to do musically” (Boyle, 1992, p. 248).
Approaches in Music Education
The link among music, emotion, and movement in early development is supported most by the
first three approaches in Table 1-the Manhattan Music Curriculum Project, Montessori, and the
Pillsbury Foundation Studies. In these free exploration approaches the emphasis is on child-
centered experiences and free musical exploration. They are similar to the active learning approach
of Montessori in the way in which experiences are used to give children an opportunity to try out
their thought processes by observing, reflecting on their findings, asking questions, and formulating
answers.
________________________________________________________________________________
Table 1. Characteristics of Selected Music Education Preschool Approaches

Group
Approach Emphasis Movement Exploration
emphasis
Free MMCP Creating and Moving in groups and in Emphasis is on free exploration of
exploration exploring. music centers with and instruments.
without instruments.
Montessori Children Moving to the piano Creating while playing with and
discovering and music (a la Dalcroze). experimenting with instruments.
exploring. Experimenting with cylinders and
monochord. Discovery of sound
Pillsbury Children’s world Movement in all its properties.
Emphasis on spontaneous music
Foundation of sound, natural or spontaneous making of young children.
exploring, forms.
Studies
discovering, and
creating.
Guided Dalcroze The link among Approached based on Create movements in response to music
exploration (Music movement, movement. Change and stories. Students guided through
Together) music, and response to expressive experiences to emphasize time, space,
musical feeling. characteristics of music.
and musical skills and relationships.
Gordon Structured formal Move to rhythm patterns Movement through imitation and
guidance to aid in and with games and improvisation using audiation.
musical songs. Experiences designed to increase skills
development. in tonal and rhythmic patterns.
Emphasis on Gordon’s learning theory.
Kinder musik Guided Moving with simple Play activities to encourage creativity.
experiences with singing games. Emphasis on singing and basic
parents experiences in music.
Kodaly Participation in Move while participating Free exploration not emphasized
singing folk in singing games. Approach designed to produce music
songs and literacy in reading, writing, and
musical literacy production.
Gruhn Guided Move to rhythm patterns Movement creativity through imitation
(Kindliche experiences with and with games and and improvisation using audiation.
Lernwelt) parents songs. Based on Gordon approach.
(informally)
Music Dalcroze based Movement emphasis Creativity through movement
Together (Dalcroze influence). improvisation. Similar to Dalcroze.
Musikgarten Guided Moving with simple Play activities to encourage creativity.
experiences with singing games. Emphasis on singing and basic
parents experiences in music.
Orff Movement, Related to Dalcroze Improvise with body, voice, and
improvisation movement ideas. instruments (e g., xylophones) Most
similar to Dalcroze with emphasis on
playing instruments.
Performance Music for Piano Moving with steady beat. Free exploration not emphasized
Young performance Experiences designed to enhance
Children production of music on the piano.
Suzuki Development of Moving to emphasize Free exploration not emphasized
the whole child performance skills such Experiences designed to enhance
with emphasis on as bow use. production of music on the violin or
performance other instrument.
skills (violin,
piano, or other
instrument).
-----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
Most of the pedagogies reviewed in Table 1 are categorized as guided exploration approaches.
In these approaches children or parents and children are taught in classes with teacher-centered
experiences. Although these guided exploration emphasis approaches are mostly delivered with
teacher-centered experiences, teachers aligned with any of the approaches may also promote the
idea of parent/child interaction. It is unlikely that those teachers would argue against parent/child
explorations and playful music making. Gruhn writes that music learning for the children aged 8
months to 25 months of his study is best seen “... as a means to support a human potential and an
obvious need for rhythmic structures and expressive sounds. This potential can be developed best
by informal guidance that connects listening experience and sound exploration with flow and
weight of body movement” (Gruhn, 2002). The final two entries of Table 1 labelled performance
are examples of many music education approaches that emphasize the acquisition of musical skills.
These approaches are typically teacher-centered and more drill and practice on skills than free
exploration of a child's musical possibilities.
Given the opportunity, children enjoy and engage in improvising music with their voices and
instruments. Clearly infant musicality must express and serve some other fundamental
developmental need of every human being. A developmental^ appropriate music curriculum would
be sensitive to the ways in which young children interact with caregivers through movement, music,
and emotion. Music curriculum based on the ideas presented in this chapter would look far different
from the standard curricula. One would find more emphasis on play, especially creative play with
music through improvisation and composition. Of all the music experiences for young children,
creative experiences are the most often forgotten in classrooms. Two kinds of experiences, free
exploration and guided exploration may facilitate improvisation. In free exploration the child is left
alone to explore instruments, the voice, pots and pans, or any other sound-making object in the
environment. In guided exploration, the teacher or parent serves as a guide to the child’s exploration
by asking questions or engaging in parallel play with the child. The job of both the parent and
teacher is to encourage the child, not get in the child’s way, and later guide his/her efforts. The
capacity and desire of young children to improvise and create in other ways deserves to be
encouraged and nurtured. A developmental^ appropriate curriculum will give young children the
opportunity to freely explore and play with sound (Flohr, 2004). Music and music education serve a
role in the promotion of the individual well-being, confidence, and social adaptation of the young
child, and opens the way to a lifelong enjoyment of learning - in making, responding to and sharing
music.
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Flohr, J. and Trevarthen, C.

(2008), Music learning in childhood: Early developments of a musical brain and

MUSIC LEARNING IN CHILDHOOD

John W. Flohr and Colwyn Trevarthen

(John Amos Comenius (1592-1671) The School of Infancy. Translated by D.

First, to introduce the topic, we contrast “teacher-centred” or instructive training of

INTRODUCTION: CULTIVATING MUSICAL BEGINNINGS

THE INNATE MUSICALITY OF

Collaborative Improvised Musical Games and Traditional Nursery Songs

Infants' Musical Intentions

Making Musical Meanings Beyond Year One: Children's Musical Culture

MUSICALITY AND MOVING IN EARLY COMMUNICATION

Principles of Movement Science

Images of Others' Moving: The Rhythmic Cerebral Mechanism of Sympathy,

Figure 1. Interrelationship of Music, Movement, and Emotion.

MUSIC AND THE PSYCHOBIOLOGY OF A CHILD'S BRAIN

Embryogenic Motives and Awareness of Moving

A Brain for Music First, and then Language

Why only Human Brains are Musical

Musicality and the Two Most Intense Times of Social Learning

Music Aptitude or Ability

We have presented evidence for an innate 'communicative musicality' generated by intrinsic

Approaches in Music Education

Table 1. Characteristics of Selected Music Education Preschool Approaches

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