ABSTRACT
In the living room of their home in a rural part of the south-west of England the two older girls in the family, one of whom is five years old and the other nine years, are setting up an interactive karaoke game. This chapter focuses on gender, the same applies to all standardised and stereotyped musical behaviours drawn along lines of social distinction. It explains the place of sociological thinking in music education. The chapter draws ideas from the sociology of music education they often need translating to make them relevant to early childhood. It expands and attempts to give greater weighting to sociological perspectives, to counter-balance the dominance of psychological perspectives. Zak's karaoke singing and dancing is embedded in his home and family life and gathers its meaning from that place and space, with his sisters and mother, and the particular cultural forms of children's popular music brought into their home via the karaoke game.
