ABSTRACT
Unlike their parents or teachers, twenty-first-century children have grown up in a digital audio environment, which has an impact on their musical experience. From their earliest toys producing tiny fragments of musical sounds and effects to the rich variety of multimodal experiences available in the DVDs they watch, children are provided with ‘an abundance of incoming, constantly changing information’ (Young, 2009). As well as traditional music toys such as drums, tambourines, xylophones and keyboards, babies and toddlers can encounter books that make sounds, singing teapots, recording microphones, toy laptops that play tunes, baby iPod apps, musical baby walkers and endless toys with buttons to press and call up a wide variety of sounds: even the child’s own favourite tunes that can be downloaded from the internet. Older children have access to a huge range of songs, musical sounds and effects through MP3-players, DVDs and video games. And of course many of these now include a multimedia component, appealing to the eyes and sometimes to the sense of touch, as well as to the ears. In contrast, the only soundproducing toy that I (VR: a child of the austere 1950s) owned was a teddy bear which growled when laid on its back: a toy that would have been familiar to a child of the nineteenth century! In two generations, technological advances have transformed the aural landscape of childhood, not only in the West, but also increasingly, through the accessibility of the Internet, across the world.
