Abstract
A mother talking and playing with her infant a few weeks old shares delicate patterns of movement with her child, matching rhythms and expressions of emotion. The infant is an active, sensitive, and creative partner, often taking the lead. The dynamics and affections or emotions of their relating depend on innate adaptations for moving the human body rhythmically to sustain vitality and for communicating their regulations of an intelligent life by shared motives and feelings. Mothers’ affectionate speech is “musical” in ways adapted to fit with and celebrate the expressive impulses and feelings of the baby seeking company. Applying methods of acoustics physics, a musician Stephen Malloch developed a microanalysis of the “communicative musicality” both mother and infant enjoy in their vocal play. He traced how parameters of sound he identified in their voices were represented in proto-conversations of the first 2 months after a full-term birth and then how the impulse to share musical expressions invents playful rituals combining poetic narratives with actions of the body in universal human ways, which lead to learning of culture-specific habits and a language. Innate motives for the discovery of meaning in companionship that appear in the first efforts of a human self to share life in movement with affectionate friends constitute an essential support for any sensitive therapeutic care or education that adults may offer for a developing child, especially for a prematurely born baby (Trevarthen and Fresquez, Body, Movement and Dance in Psychotherapy, 2015; Trevarthen and Malloch, The Nordic Journal of Music Therapy 9(2), 3–17, 2000).
“Let the child lead the way”
Maori proverb, New Zealand
Trevarthen, C. (2017, in press) Maternal voice and communicative musicality: Sharing the meaning of life from before birth. For “Maternal Voice Intervention and Preterm Infant's Brain Development”. Edited by Manuela Filippa, Pierre Kuhn and Björn Westrup. Springer, Chapter 1.
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Trevarthen, C. (2017). Maternal Voice and Communicative Musicality: Sharing the Meaning of Life from Before Birth. In: Filippa, M., Kuhn, P., Westrup, B. (eds) Early Vocal Contact and Preterm Infant Brain Development . Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-65077-7_1
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