Early social communication through music: State of the art and future perspectives

Abstract

A growing body of research shows that the universal capacity for music perception and production emerges early in development. Possibly building on this predisposition, caregivers around the world often communicate with infants using songs or speech entailing song-like characteristics. This suggests that music might be one of the earliest developing and most accessible forms of interpersonal communication, providing a platform for studying early communicative behavior. However, little research has examined music in truly communicative contexts. The current work aims to facilitate the development of experimental approaches that rely on dynamic and naturalistic social interactions. We first review two longstanding lines of research that examine musical interactions by focusing either on the caregiver or the infant. These include defining the acoustic and non-acoustic features that characterize infant-directed (ID) music, as well as behavioral and neurophysiological research examining infants’ processing of musical timing and pitch. Next, we review recent studies looking at early musical interactions holistically. This research focuses on how caregivers and infants interact using music to achieve co-regulation, mutual engagement, and increase affiliation and prosocial behavior. We conclude by discussing methodological, technological, and analytical developments that might empower a comprehensive study of musical communication in early childhood.

Sing to me, baby: Infants show neural tracking and rhythmic movements to live and dynamic maternal singing

“…Mothers’ singing was highly varied on the individual level, which did not allow us to make stronger claims about the relation of specific acoustic features (such as pitch and tempo) in relation to neural tracking. Hence, future studies might consider more controlled stimuli that vary less across infants (e.g., Lense et al, 2022; Nguyen et al, 2023; Weineck et al, 2022) or use methodological approaches that can take into account how the variance in stimuli relates to infants’ tracking/attention over time. In addition, we need to consider the fit of the musical piece to the particular situation in which we observed infants.…”