Name:Verena, Buren

School/Affiliation:Max Planck Institute for Empirical Aesthetics

Co-Authors:Katharina Schaaf, Daniel Müllensiefen, Franziska Degé

Virtual or In-person:In-person

Abstract:

The study of child musicality has traditionally focused on perceptual skills, particularly auditory discrimination (Hallam, 2006), leaving other important facets, such as musical communication, largely unexplored. While musical communication—encompassing emotional perception, expressive ability, and creative fluency—has been shown to be an important aspect of musicality in young children (Buren et al., 2021), it has not yet been systematically assessed in this age group.
This study aims to investigate how musical communication can be evaluated in children aged 3 to 6 years. We piloted tasks involving musical idea-fluency, improvisation, reflexive interaction, movement imitation, and emotional discrimination and production in order to get a clearer picture of these abilities and their relation.
Fifty children (58% female, mean age = 5;2, SD = 11.2 months) completed the tasks across two sessions. Item analyses revealed that most tasks effectively captured inter-individual differences, particularly in children aged 4 and above. A notable association between musical creativity and communication was observed, with the type of instrument used (drum or keyboard) contributing to shared variance. Proposed improvements include refining instructions for reflexive interaction, adapting originality assessments for improvisation, and simplifying emotion discrimination tasks for younger participants.
Our findings provide valuable initial insights into assessing musical communication in early childhood and offer a foundation for further research.