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This article reports on the impact of a generalist teacher-led music program on early childhood school children's singing skills and attitudes to music. Singing tests and class surveys were administered to students in 11 Australian primary schools where music specialists mentored classroom teachers over the period of one to two school terms. The results show that implementing music activities in early education settings can positively impact young children's singing skills and attitudes to music regardless of gender, ethnicity and socio-economic standing of the school. The study provides empirical evidence of the benefits accrued by children through access to music education. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In this study, I explored children's development of rhythmic music literacy using a language acquisition paradigm. An emergent, constructivist curriculum was implemented over one academic year with 39 children, 5–8 years old. Children were involved in audiation-based active listening, singing, moving, chanting, and playing instruments and engaged in musical dialogue through imitation and improvisation. They had rhythm stories read to them, they wrote and read their own. A comprehensive musical development progress log, individual and collective music reading assessments, analysis of children's notated rhythms, and video recordings of children reading their notated music comprised the data set, which was analysed regularly and triangulated for validity. For trustworthiness, early childhood and general music practitioners observed the curriculum in action and reviewed children's notational artefacts. Findings indicated that, as children wrote and read their rhythm stories, they self-corrected when making mistakes – revising their stories upon reading them aloud, giving clues to their formation of musical meaning through the audiation and sound of notated music. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

There’s extensive research on infant’s discrimination of speaking voices but few studies have focused on infant’s discrimination of singing voices. Most investigations on infants’ perception of timbre in music have been based on instrumental sounds. We completed an experiment with 7- and 13-month-olds (n = 16 and n = 17 respectively) to answer two basic questions: Can infants discriminate melodies sung by the same woman? Can they discriminate the voices of women singing the same melody?We found that infants did not discriminate between the voices and that only the older infants discriminated between two melodies sung by the same woman. In other words, older infants discriminated the melodies but not the voices, and younger infants discriminated neither.The results of the present study question the assumption that infants discriminate singing voices and suggest that there may be critical differences in how infants perceive the timbre of voices in music and language contexts. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]