Everyday music in infancy

Abstract

Infants enculturate to their soundscape over the first year of life, yet theories of how they do so rarely make contact with details about the sounds available in everyday life.Here, we report on properties of a ubiquitous early ecology in which foundational skills get built: music. We captured daylong recordings from 35 infants ages 6-12 months at home and fully double-coded 467 h of everyday sounds for music and its features, tunes, and voices. Analyses of this first-of-its-kind corpus revealed two distributional properties of infants' everyday musical ecology. First, infants encountered vocal music in over half, and instrumental in over three-quarters, of everyday music. Live sources generated one-third, and recorded sources three-quarters, of everyday music. Second, infants did not encounter each individual tune and voice in their day equally often.Instead, the most available identity cumulated to many more seconds of the day than would be expected under a uniform distribution. These properties of everyday music in human infancy are different from what is discoverable in environments highly constrained by context (e.g., laboratories) and time (e.g., minutes rather than hours).Together with recent insights about the everyday motor, language, and visual ecologies of infancy, these findings reinforce an emerging priority to build theories of development that address the opportunities and challenges of real input encountered by real learners.

Quantifying Everyday Ecologies: Principles for Manual Annotation of Many Hours of Infants' Lives

“…We also identified individual tune(s) and voice(s) in each music bout. After identifying the durations of music bouts, subsequent features were annotated as present or absent per bout given that durations would arise straightforwardly for those bouts containing a single feature (see Mendoza and Fausey, 2021a; we repeat some methodological rationale throughout). Figure 1 shows the OSF components that supported this annotation as we took the following steps in our workflow.…”

“…The core goal of manual annotation is to identify annotation targets within the stream of sensory experiences captured by a recording device. Because sensory histories are not uniform (e.g., Jayaraman et al, 2015;Roy et al, 2015;Tamis-LeMonda et al, 2017;Clerkin et al, 2018;Mendoza and Fausey, 2021a), annotation targets will sometimes be present and other times be absent throughout the recorded stream. Discovering structure in this everyday ecology requires identifying when instances of the "same" thing happen again even when separated in time, context, and with only partially overlapping instantiations.…”

“…For example, musical sounds have been defined as "humanly produced, non-random sequences of tones or tone combinations that are non-referential" and vocal, instrumental, live, and recorded music have been instantiated in laboratory tasks (Trehub and Schellenberg, 1995). Infants also track repetition and variation across musical tunes and voices in these tasks (for review see Mendoza and Fausey, 2021a). Researcher-constrained instantiations of a construct are only starting points for operationalizing annotation targets because everyday sensory streams include a much wider range of activities, behaviors, and generating sources than laboratory contexts (Young and Gillen, 2007;Lamont, 2008;de Barbaro and Fausey, in press).…”

“…One dramatic illustration of this is the discovery of a total of 313 instances of the word "breakfast" in 15 months of continuously transcribed adult speech (Roy et al, 2015) which works out to fewer than one instance per day. Multiple and varied instances of other behaviors can be quantified by dense annotation within daily or hourly samples (e.g., Clerkin et al, 2018;Tamis-LeMonda et al, 2018;Mendoza and Fausey, 2021a). Altogether, if the necessary volume of everyday instances is unlikely to occur all at once or if there is not yet enough known about a phenomenon to predict when it will occur at a high volume, then theorists may need to sample extended and densely in order to discover theory-relevant distributions of experience.…”

“…One insight from recent efforts using these technologies is that when relevant sensory histories naturally unfold over extended timescales, shorter samples miss pervasive properties of infants' everyday ecologies. For example, short language samples miss typical rhythms of interleaving speech and silence (Tamis-LeMonda et al, 2017;Cristia et al, 2021) and short musical samples (Mendoza and Fausey, 2021a) fail to capture opportunities for repetition and variability as instances arise non-uniformly over time (Smith et al, 2018). An emerging priority for theories of development is therefore to model very large amounts of everyday experience.…”