Children’s verbal explanations of their visual representation of the music

Abstract

Recent findings in music research are increasingly confirming the embodied nature of music cognition. Assuming that a bodily engagement with music may affect the children’s musical meaning formation, we investigated how young children’s interaction with music, based on verbal description after listening versus body movement description while listening, may be reflected in the verbal explanation of their own visual representations of the music they listened to. In this study, 47 children (aged 9–10) without any formal music education participated in a verbal-based versus movement-based intervention. Before and after the interventions, children created a visual representation of the music and provided a verbal explanation of their drawing. Thematic analysis and statistical tests on the verbal data revealed a significant change in semantic themes, time dimension, and the number of music parameters gathered by children involved in body movement description of the music. Our results offer interesting insights on the role of body movement on children’s pattern perception and musical meaning formation.