Mothers sing expressively while caring for infants. Initially, such singing is for emotion regulation: for promoting tranquility, sleep, playful engagement, or stress reduction, depending on the context. Infants’ responsiveness to such singing encourages further maternal singing. Mothers act as singing mentors even though their mentoring is initially intuitive versus deliberate, emphasizing pleasure/comfort over precision. Their singing also has intuitive didactic aspects in its emphasis on pitch and temporal structure of songs. The face-to-face context provides infants with performances featuring distinctive visual/vocal gestures. As imitators, infants mimic maternal performances, prompting mothers to become deliberate mentors who coax increasingly complex contributions from infants. Initially, infants make single-syllable contributions to such duets, progressing to phrases and songs. Well before age two, many toddlers produce singing that preserves pitch contours, rhythms, and approximate range of familiar songs. Subsequent educator mentoring can build on these achievements if relationship building and maintenance have priority over skill building.
This study analyzed the music reading performances of 6-13-year-old piano students (N = 35) in their second year of piano study. The stimuli consisted of three piano pieces, systematically constructed to vary in terms of left-hand complexity and input simultaneity. The music reading performances were recorded digitally and a code of error analysis was constructed from the data. The effect of age on the types of errors made was investigated. The age differences found were in terms of error frequency, performance continuity, contour preservation, and stimulus complexity. The study sheds light on what may be typical music reading errors of piano students in their second year of study and suggests some trends of age-related development in music reading among piano students.
The present study explored the singing ability of toddlers 16 months to 3 years of age by examining North American adults' ability to identify toddlers' renditions of familiar tunes sung with foreign lyrics. After listening to each toddler's song, half with familiar melodies and half with unfamiliar melodies, adults attempted to name the songs. Their identification was highly accurate, refuting the prevailing view that toddlers focus on words at the expense of tunes. The singing range of these non-English-speaking toddlers and that of their English-speaking counterparts approximated the pitch range of the target songs, which is inconsistent with the reportedly small singing range of toddlers. Toddlers' apparent singing proficiency in the present context may stem from the use of home-based recordings and child-selected songs.
The objective of this study was to evaluate how parentÁinfant music classes would benefit young mothers frequenting a support group for young mothers at a community centre in comparison to a group of older mothers. When the courses had terminated the mothers were interviewed in their homes and their singing confidence was assessed, as well as their alertness to their infants' musical behaviour. The mental well-being of the mothers was measured using the short version of the WarwickÁEdinburgh Mental Well-being Scale (SWEMWBS).The results indicated that the courses were perceived as beneficial to the mothers and the infants to a similar extent as to older mothers who regularly participate in such classes with their infants. The young mothers were as interested as the older mothers in their infants' musical development. Some indications of age-related differences were found in terms of attitudes towards maternal roles in the future music education of their children. No differences were found in the subjective well-being between the younger and older mothers. Both groups rated high on the SWEMWBS.
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