Music Babble

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Think about how your child learns language – by hearing you speak every day, by trying out sounds, and having you respond with delight to their coos and babbling.  Ideally, children learn music in much the same way they learn language: through immersion in a rich environment with opportunities to develop listening, singing, and moving vocabularies.  You’ll notice your child’s early vocalizations are song-like and their movements contain many rhythmic elements.  Music educators recognize the importance of encouraging children’s “musical babble” in much the same way we encourage their language babble: an opportunity to play with sounds (pitches and rhythms) as they experience them.

Children gradually move from absorbing sounds, to playing with sounds through babble, and eventually to imitating musical patterns and phrases. You can encourage your child’s musical development by

·      Singing songs to him

·      Echoing his vocalizations with attention to pitch and rhythm (lip bubbles, coos, “yabba-dabba” and “ba-ba-ba-ba” type patterns),

·      Having “conversations” of back-and-forth musical babble.

Not only will you be having fun together, this will help facilitate your child’s musical development and could support other areas of cognitive development as well.

For more information about musical babble, including a CD with examples of songs and chants for young children, see Music Play: The Early Childhood Music Curriculum Guide for Parents Teachers & Caregivers (Valerio, Reynolds, Bolton, Taggart & Gordon, GIA Publications).