No abstract

Adults mediate the relationship between material reality and children, according to functional units of cultural relevance. This paper explores early development of semiotic systems in infants, analyzing rhythmic, sonorous and melodic components, which enable adult-child interaction with and about objects. The triads (with sonorous and non-sonorous objects) was studied longitudinally at age 2, 4 and 6 months. We propose that rhythmic, sonorous and melodic components conformed one of the basic semiotic systems upon the adult's action relies (through gestures and uses of objects) in order to segment and organize objects in the world. Likewise, children actively respond to these presentations and seek sounds for themselves when they are able to interact with the object more autonomously.

Research of the last 30 years showed the importance of music for psychological development.Communicative musicality studies described musical organisations in dyadic interactions (adult-baby). However, other perspectives proposed that, from the beginning of life, there are early triadic interactions (adult-object-baby) that should also be analysed. Following previous research, we hypothesised that early triadic interactions have a structured musical organisation. We recorded a 2 month-old child interacting with his mother and an object in their home and performed a microgenetic quantitative-qualitative analysis. Given the child's age, we focused on musical characteristics of the mother's actions. To our knowledge, this is the first study to combine data processing provided by ELAN, Finale, and Matlab-MIRtoolbox. Our analysis shows that the child participates in triadic interactions in which the mother communicates about and through the maraca using musical resources in increasingly complex ways. Musical structuring happens at the intersegment, intrasequence, and intersequence levels, and involves different musical parameters. We suggest musical organisation in early triadic interactions follows a holographic structure in which each piece carries information about dynamic processes of different timescales. Results highlight the importance of considering objects and their uses to better understand early communicative musicality.

No abstract

The aim of this study is to determine whether a live music therapy session during parent holding had an effect on physiological and comfort outcomes of late-moderate preterm infants, on their parents, and on the ward environment. This is a quasi-experimental study of a cohort of 44 preterm / adult pairs exposed to a music therapy session in the first two weeks after birth. There were 3 moments of observation (before, during, and after the intervention), at which heart rate (HR), oxygen saturation (O2-sat), the infant’s behavioral-emotional activation level, and the environmental response were measured. A statistically significant increase was observed in O2-sat (p<.001) after the intervention, as well as a decrease in HR (p<.001). Personal and environmental stress was observed to decrease (p<.001). A music therapy session in the Neonatal Unit at the time of interaction between parents and premature infants was found to be useful in reducing stress and promoted a positive interaction between parents and infants.