"The baby relies on the sound of my voice." Maternal perceptions of musical singing interactions between mother and child.

Abstract

Musical interactions between mother and child are expression and communication phenomena that have been present in all civilizations through the different manifestations of the mother's voice, and they have been the object of study in various investigations. This article follows this line of research by documenting the perspectives of nine mothers of up to 18-month year old babies on musical interactions specifically related to singing and the intervention of the mother's voice in the province of Barcelona. This qualitative study utilizes the semi-structured interview with open-ended questions for data collection. In the process of transcription and analysis, open and manual coding was used to define specific categories: pregnancy, repertoire, origin, frequent actions, and affective experiences. These categories could group the most important characteristics of the musical interactions described by the mothers in their narrations. The results indicate that the participating mothers use communicative mechanisms of musical expression that go beyond the action of singing to show the baby that s/he is being cared for, protected, and loved.