ABSTRACT
The long intellectual journey toward conception of infants as ”musical” began with graduate training in a program that awarded degrees in theoretical and experimental psychology. An appreciation of infants' ability to perceive musical features is not possible without a cursory understanding of adult abilities in the domain. Music perception skills in infancy are assessed by having infants listen to a repeating pattern presented from a laterally displaced loudspeaker. With increasing exposure to music, however, culture-specific conventions might dominate perceptual processing, attenuating the advantages of pattern simplicity. Several investigators have drawn attention to musical features in speech directed to infants. All cultures have a special genre of music for children, which consists of lullabies and play songs. The ubiquity of caregivers' singing and quasi-musical speech means that infants are surrounded by musical elements for much of their waking time. Affective responsiveness to contrasting musical samples can be evaluated by video-recording infants as they listen to each sound type.
