Interplay between pretend and music play

SHIFRES, F. Y ESPAÑOL, S.

Evanston, IL

Congreso; 8th International Conference on Music Perception & Cognition,; 2004

European Society for the Cognitive Science of Music (ESCOM)

This paper shows the results of the analysis of more than 60 hours of adult-infant (24-36-mounths-old) interaction, concerning presence, characterization and interplay of two varieties of play arising from interactive contexts: Pretend Play and Musical Play. It was observed that, in most of the cases, musical play takes place within contexts of pretend play. That means that infants can fluently participate in and leave the fictional context in order to share with the adult the attention towards a musical attribute. In the sequence pretend.musical.pretend play, the latter incorporates some structural attributes of the previous musical play. For example: a rhythmic pattern . thematically abstract- that was the focus of attention during the musical play is added to a fictional action, contributing to refine and elaborate the play in which the infant was previously engaged. We discuss the inherent time structure of musical play as framework for developing narrativefictional sequences. It is also feasible that musical features of refined pretend play are essential components of the powerful intersubjective experience that usually accompanies it.