Eugenia Costa-Giomi - The sounds of childhood: analysis of continuous recordings of home soundscapes

ABSTRACT

 

Infants learn complex aural communication systems rapidly and seemingly without effort simply through exposure to sounds. However, the way in which they learn to organize auditory information is dependent upon the characteristics of their soundscapes. For example, the type and quantity of infants’ exposure to speech affect their language development and the musical experiences in which they are immersed affects their preferential attention and recognition of music.

We studied infants’ (n=10) language and music environments by analyzing continuous high-fidelity recordings of their home soundscapes captured with a digital language processor that automatically outputs data on selected language parameters. In this presentation, I will present an overview of the findings, and discuss the need to develop a similar automated acoustical analysis for music parameters.  

 

ABOUT EUGENIA COSTA-GIOMI

Eugenia Costa-Giomi is a professor of Music Education at The Ohio State University. She was previously director of Graduate Studies and professor of Music and Human Learning and Developmental Psychology at the University of Texas-Austin, and associate professor and chair of Music Education at McGill University, Canada. She has extensive experience teaching music to children and has served in the editorial boards of research journals in music education and psychology, as chair of the Society for Research in Music Education, the International Conference in Music Perception and Cognition, the Music Perception SRIG (MENC), the Early Childhood SRIG (NAFME), and the International Symposium of Research on Music Behavior. Her research focuses on music perception and cognition in early childhood, music learning and development, and the benefits of music participation.