The analysis took place in his laboratory at Edinburgh University, and showed how the mother joined her daughter with imitative sounds that were modulated emotionally to invite the infant’s coos and to acknowledge them in shared time. Seventeen years later, in 1996, in the Psychology Department at the very same university, Stephen Malloch listened to tapes of mothers and their babies ‘chatting’ with each other, recorded by Trevarthen in the 70’s. One of the first tapes was the vocal interaction of Laura and her mother.Īs I listened, intrigued by the fluid give and take of the communication, and the lilting speech of the mother as she chatted with her baby, I began to tap my foot. I am, by training, a musician, so I was very used to automatically feeling the beat as I listened to musical sounds.… I replaced the tape, and again, I could sense a distinct rhythmicity and melodious give and take to the gentle prompting of Laura’s mother and the pitched vocal replies from Laura. A few weeks later, as I walked down the stairs to Colwyn’s main lab, the words ‘communicative musicality’ came into my mind as a way of describing what I had heard. Through Malloch’ further work with spectrographs and pitch plots of the interactions of mother infant dyads, the theory of communicative musicality found precise formulation in terms of the parameters: pulse, quality and narrative. This was first reported in Malloch (1999/2000), in the Special Issue of Musicae Scientiae, known to many of NJMT’s readers.
0 Comments
Leave a Reply. |
AuthorWrite something about yourself. No need to be fancy, just an overview. ArchivesCategories |