Musical Features of Mother-Infant Interactions
We can,I believe with good reason,claim that mother-infant interactions
are composed of elements that are literally,not just metaphorically,
musical.
It is,of course,immediately suggestive that the prosody of motherese,
like music,is melodic,that it makes use of rhythmic regularity and variety
(including pauses or rests),and dynamic variation in intensity (stress and
accent),volume (crescendo and diminuendo),speed (accelerando and
decelerando),and alterations of vocal timbre.Even though semantically
meaningful words are used by the mother,they are presumably heard by
the baby as combinations of sounds with particular features and rela-
tions,not as verbal messages,and these features and relations are musical
(Dissanayake,1999).
However,I would like to emphasize other compelling and less imme-
diately evident similarities between music and mother-infant interaction,
namely,their use of sequential structural features that rely on expecta-
tion to create emotional meaning;the importance in both of crossmodal
neural processing,using kinesic and visual as well as vocal channels;the
importance to both of physical movement;and the achievement in both
of social regulation and emotional bonding.Expectancy and Emotion
Because rhythms underlie all motor and vocal behavior (Lenneberg
1967,in Beebe,Lachmann,and Jaffe 1997:167),rhythmicity alone (which
usually refers to rhythmic regularity) is not a sufficiently differentiated
concept when considering either its role in infant affect or the relation-
ship of mother-infant interaction to music.(The oft-heard assumption
that the mother’s heartbeat heard by the infant in utero is somehow
relevant to music,either ontogenetically or phylogenetically,seems to me
to be of limited interest.) The mother and infant do not synchronize their
rhythms so much as coordinate and corespond to each other’s alterations
of these rhythms.^3
Mother-infant engagement and music are temporal (or sequential)
structures in which changes unfolding in the present create and are the
experience (Stern 1995:34).Episodes are composed of smaller units
that are often variations on a melodic,rhythmic,or narrative theme or
themes.Anticipation is thereby created, manipulated,delayed, and
ultimately,when all goes well,satisfied.
A mother’s utterances also appear to be organized primarily into what
can be transcribed as lines (or phrases),judged either by number of
words,or by timed length,which is generally three to four seconds,as394 Ellen Dissanayake