Music is universally prevalent in human society and is a salient component of the lives of young families. Here, we studied the frequency of singing and playing recorded music in the home using surveys of parents with infants ( N = 945). We found that most parents sing to their infant on a daily basis and the frequency of infant-directed singing is unrelated to parents’ income or ethnicity. Two reliable individual differences emerged, however: (i) fathers sing less than mothers and (ii) as infants grow older, parents sing less. Moreover, the latter effect of child age was specific to singing and was not reflected in reports of the frequency of playing recorded music. Last, we meta-analysed reports of the frequency of infant-directed singing and found little change in its frequency over the past 30 years, despite substantial changes in the technological environment in the home. These findings, consistent with theories of the psychological functions of music, in general, and infant-directed singing, in particular, demonstrate the everyday nature of music in infancy. This article is part of the theme issue ‘Voice modulation: from origin and mechanism to social impact (Part I)’.

Humans readily make inferences about the behavioral context of the music they hear. These inferences tend to be accurate, even if the songs are in foreign languages or unfamiliar musical idioms: upon hearing a Blackfoot lullaby, a Korean listener with no experience of Blackfoot music, language, or broader culture is far more likely to judge the music’s function as “to soothe a baby” than as “for dancing”. Are such inferences shaped by musical exposure or does the human mind naturally detect certain links between musical form and function? Children’s developing experiences with music provide a clear test of this question. We studied musical inferences in a large sample of children (𝑁 = 2,418), who heard dance, lullaby, and healing songs from 70 world cultures and were tasked with guessing the original behavioral context in which each was performed. We found little evidence for the effect of experience on musical inferences: children reliably inferred the original behavioral contexts of unfamiliar foreign songs, with only minimal improvement in performance from the youngest (age 3 or younger) to the oldest (age 12) participants. Children’s inferences tightly correlated with those of adults for the same songs, as collected from a similar massive online experiment (𝑁 = 85,068). Moreover, the same acoustic features explained variability in both children’s and adults’ inferences. These findings imply that accurate inferences about the behavioral contexts of music, driven by links between form and function in music across cultures, do not require extensive musical experience.

Inhibitory control is a transdiagnostic risk factor for externalizing behaviors, particularly during adolescence. Despite advances in understanding links between inhibitory control and externalizing behaviors across youth on average, significant questions remain about how these links play out in the day-to-day lives of individual adolescents. The goals of the current study were to: (1) validate a novel 100-occasion measure of inhibitory control; (2) assess links between day-to-day fluctuations in inhibitory control and individual differences in externalizing behaviors; and (3) illustrate the potential of intensive longitudinal studies for person-specific analyses of adolescent externalizing behaviors. Participants were 106 youth (57.5% female, Mage = 13.34 years; SDage = 1.92) who completed a virtual baseline session followed by 100 daily surveys, including an adapted Stroop Color Word task designed to assess inhibitory control. Results suggested that the novel task was generally reliable and valid, and that inhibitory control fluctuated across days in ways that were meaningfully associated with individual differences in baseline impulsive behaviors. Results of illustrative personalized analyses suggested that inhibitory control had more influence in the daily networks of adolescents who used substances during the 100 days than in a matched set of adolescents who did not. This work marks a path forward in intensive longitudinal research by validating a novel inhibitory control measure, revealing that daily fluctuations in inhibitory control may be a unique construct broadly relevant to adolescent externalizing problems, and at the same time, highlighting that links between daily inhibitory control and impulsive behaviors are adolescent-specific.