The World of Babies project - music and children

Music and children

Music is universal in our lives and is thought to have been co-evolved a social cohesion activity (Savage et al., 2020). It is profoundly important from infancy to death.

In a study using an experience sampling method on everyday use of music, participants listened to music in 37% of the sampled episodes (Juslin, Liljestrom, Västfjäll, Barradas, & Silva, 2008). What about children and music?  Lee and Welch (2017) found that 54% of teachers reported using background music during children’s free-play and finding this activity helpful in supporting content-related curriculum. Another study by Gillespie and Gillespie (2010) also reported that music is used 6.5 times per hour, on average, in classrooms to scaffold children’s learning and facilitate everyday activities.

Additionally, some studies have suggested that there is a strong association between music and language (even writing skills), during early development (Chan, Ho, Cheung, 1998; Moreno et al., 2009). Apparently, this is effect is long-lasting too; even if a person had not played music for more than 40 years early musical training can prevent later cognitive decline.

However, formal music education does not start before the age of 5 and exposure to music in the first year of life is incidental. It is usually based on parental musical preferences and habits, or nursery rhymes and songs learnt in early childcare. It seems that music education in school-aged children is subject to ever rising tuition fees and results in music becoming less and less accessible.

This project aims to understand how children relate to music and how they can tell this in their drawings. Drawing is a relatively early skill to develop and does not depend on language, thus it can be used from very young ages from all around the world. Children’s drawings are extremely salient descriptors of how they see the world, salient even for other children.

Project goals

Some of goals of the project are the following:

1. To increase awareness of the importance of music in young children.
2. To understand how young children represent music and express that in their drawings.
3. To actually engage children in arts,drawing about music, and to make them aware of other children’s experiences related to music.
4. To initiate interaction with early educators on children’s relationship with music.

Music and me

As children see and draw music.

We thank all children and parents for the wonderful submissions.

It was difficult to decide on the prizes!

Unfortunately, quite a few submissions did not use the public ID in the submission system, thus we have no way to identify the age of the child. In such cases, while we truly like those drawings, we were unable to enter them into the competition, as the prizes were announced separately in the three age-groups. Nonetheless, we truly like all submissions that tell us about children’s relationship to music in their drawings and are immensely grateful for every contribution.