Sound possibilities: listening for the new in early years music-making practices

ABSTRACT

Posthumanism points towards a relational understanding of embodied processes of becoming musical in and with the world which readily combine with existing aspects of early years music practice. In this article I describe the potential of this resonant encounter to develop alternative approaches to listening, opening further possibilities for both research and practice. Drawing on the experience of researching with young children, musicians and Zoom during COVID-19, I describe the pandemic as a ‘ruption’ (Chappell, Turner, and Wren 2024), a disturbance from which new things may emerge. I contrast listening as usual with ‘emergent listening’ (Davies 2014), describing how the latter has potential to expand our understanding of children-making-music and to make space for more diverse players to enter the scene, both human and other-than-human. I provide an example of using emergent listening in research documentation, holding the space open for divergent understandings of an emergent practice to develop.

KEYWORDS:

• Early years
• co-becoming
• posthumanism
• emergent listening

Posthumanism challenges educators and researchers to refocus attention, decentering the individual human from our visual and auditory fields and making space for a more diverse set of players to enter the scene, both human and other-than-human (Braidotti 2019). I suggest that therefore it invites us to listen differently. I argue that this invitation generates creative possibilities for how we understand music-making in early years educational settings, particularly in the context of rapid, unpredictable social and environmental change. I draw on an experience of researching with musicians, young children, early years staff and a range of other digital and non-digital materialities during COVID-19, providing an example of how utilising posthuman theory opens new possibilities for research and practice in a situation of challenge and change. Young (2021) urged us to consider that:

The pandemic could be a point at which we break with the past and do not go back to ‘normal’ – whatever normal is. A point at which we demand radical change and demand a music education that is about caring for others, for community cohesion, for caring for the planet and all its living things.

Treating this as a provocation, I view the COVID-19 pandemic as a ‘ruption.’ I use the understanding of this term put forward by Chappell, Turner, and Wren (2024, 4): the ‘fissures, cracks, wedges and leverages that lead to an inevitable flow of energy or activity which provoke change.’ Contrasting with a disruption that may be an interruption in the usual flow of events, a ‘ruption’ links more closely to an eruption, a bursting forth, a disturbance from which change may continue to emerge. Linking to the creative notion of emergence (Osberg and Biesta 2021), a ‘ruption’ has an unpredictable quality, helping it to resist being harnessed by normative developmental and curricular demands, and instead allowing it to open spaces for the ambiguous, uncertain, specific, different and divergent to productively co-become in relation. Engaging with this emergent character, I utilise the concept of ‘emergent listening’ (Davies 2014, 21) as a way to broaden my auditory attention to the diverse encounters set in motion between humans and between humans and other-than-humans, including the digital, identifying questions that are opened through this approach.

I adopt what Barad (2007, 185) describes as an ‘ethico-onto-epistemology’: Rejecting the assumption of an inherent difference between human and non-human, and of a gap between ‘knower; and ‘known’, Barad explains: ‘We don’t obtain knowledge by standing outside the world; we know because we are of the world. We are part of the world in its differential becoming’ (185). Barad sees knowing and being as entangled or ‘mutually implicated,’ (185) thus as an inherently ethical task. In this article I bring together an assemblage of ideas, data, and practices in which I am also entangled. The implications of this ethico-onto-epistemological position are first described in more detail by identifying synergies between young children’s music-making practices and posthuman theory; putting these two in dialogue provoked an interest in the concept of emergent ‘co-becomings’ in this context. I describe how I put this ethico-onto-epistemology into action by briefly introducing the research informing the article, and next describe how alternative approaches to listening arose from/ co-became with encounters between listening as usual, posthuman thinking and the empirical demands of researching early years music-making in a pandemic. I introduce Davies (2014) concept of emergent listening, going on to describe how I utilised this as a research practice in an online music-making project. I conclude by mapping different paths emerging from this approach, illustrating how altered priorities, shifts in power, and ongoing energy for change emerge productively from utilising emergent listening to embrace a ‘ruption’ in music education as usual (Chappell, Turner, and Wren 2024).

Connecting early years music-making practices and posthuman theory

The synergies between early years music-making practices and posthuman theory provide a constructive basis for listening differently in this context. Two of these synergies are core aspects of the theoretical groundwork for what follows:

The first centres on an embodied understanding of music-making, relating posthuman theory to existing multi-modal conceptions of music-making for young children as ‘creative play with sound and body’ (Trehub 2019, 394). Music and movement have long been connected through approaches such as the Dalcroze method (Juntunen 2020). Nijs and Bremmer (2019) echo these connections in their work on embodied cognition in the early years, emphasising an understanding of cognition as ‘action embodied and contextualised by the particular setting where such occurs.’ (Veloso 2017, 260). Posthuman theory resonates with this work, emphasising a continuum between body and mind. Rejecting the idea of a binary division placing the body in the service of the mind (arguably the position of embodied cognition), Braidotti (2019, 31) describes the ‘posthuman knowing subject’ instead as ‘relational, embodied, embedded, affective, accountable.’ The body is no longer understood as a mediator or tool for learning that remains fundamentally cognitive, separate from the ‘learner’ as the knowing subject. Instead, the body is a site for learning; specific, located and accountable to the social and material world of which it is a part. The body is where musical learning takes place.

A second core point of synergy relates to intra-action (Barad 2008). Where an interaction describes a meeting or exchange between pre-existing things, for Barad, ‘intra-action’ denotes the process of materially producing different phenomena through relation. Applying this to the matter of humans, Barad (2008, 139) claims; ‘“Human bodies” and “human subjects” do not preexist as such; nor are they mere end products. “Humans” are neither pure cause nor pure effect, but part of the world in its open-ended becoming.’ Barad identifies a continual process of differentiating, of becoming, in relation not just with human-others, but also with the world in all its entangled material and discursive diversity.

Applying this concept to musical play, an intra-active understanding of music-making embeds the idea of ‘becoming musical’ irrevocably within our specific social, discursive and material worlds, emphasising the multi-dimensional entanglements of becoming-child-becoming-music-becoming-world (Leppänen 2011). This resonates with my own prior experiences of children’s open-ended playing with/in music and sound, which have encompassed project development with musicians in different early years contexts as well as musical adventures as a parent. I experience children vocalising, moving, touching, sounding, noticing, inventing, repeating, adopting, adapting, discarding: the boundaries between sounding and sounded objects and children’s active immersion with/in them feel fluid and open.

A process of intra-active ‘becoming’ has much in common with Reggio Emilia inspired pedagogical approaches – a connection taken up by several posthuman and new materialist scholars (for example, Davies 2014; Giamminuti, Merewether, and Blaise 2021; Lenz Taguchi 2011; Murris 2016; Osgood and Odegard 2022). In this pedagogy, careful attention is paid to the ‘environment’ for learning, considered an ‘educator’ itself, interacting and taking shape in relation to learning experiences (Reggio Emilia Approach® 2022). This approach has been put to work in musical practices which may, for instance, utilise sound and sound-producing objects as ‘provocations’ for learning emerging in relation between children, teachers and environment (Young 2024, 134). The ‘environment’ is still in a sense a context for the human protagonists; nevertheless the interrelation and interdependencies between the two is a focus of attention, encompassing the co-becoming of the environment and the child.

In my research I looked for ways to combine these aspects of theory and practice, in their similarities and differences. I oriented my research around the concept of listening for ‘co-becomings’, drawing on both Braidotti’s (2019) embodied and embedded relational subject and Barad’s (2008) intra-active material-discursive subject in process.

Introduction to the research

This article draws on research which took place in a pre-school, listening to ‘co-becomings’ with a group of 20 children aged two-four, three members of staff, two musicians and a project manager. All were part of a wider-ranging early years music development project taking place across the South-West of England. The study coincided with the onset of the COVID-19 pandemic meaning both project and research took place on Zoom. Early years staff and children were together in their usual venue; musicians, the project manager and I were individually linked to them by Zoom.

In keeping with the ethico-onto-epistemological positioning of the research, I utilise the idea of ‘diffraction’ in the research, bringing together theory and data, searching for ways to read one through the other (Barad 2007, 28). Barad (2007, 28) describes diffraction as a ‘performative’ approach to research. By contrast to a representationalist approach – one in which representations and the objects they represent are independent of one another – they describe a performative approach as one which is about ‘matters of practices or doings or actions’ (28) which deliberately reject fixing in advance what constitutes the subject and what constitutes the object of research. I followed Mazzei’s (2014) description of the researcher actively entering the research assemblage – that is to say I played an active role in the entangled grouping of research participants (children, adults, Zoom, sound, etc), research practices, theory and data that together with me as the researcher made up the ‘research machine’ (Stenliden et al. 2018, 22). In practice I approached this through a variety of methods:

I used traditional ethnographic methods including observation, taken in a posthuman direction by utilising prompts to expand my gaze beyond the human. Other approaches were more improvisatory and interactive drawing on Cooke’s (2020) research which foregrounds the agentic role of materials in music education research through playful approaches deriving from Ingold’s (2013) concept of ‘making.’ According to Cooke (2020, 406):

Making with is a making of relationships across and between matter; it is always inventing as a dynamic response. It is a making which is rooted not in a telling of past events, representing and interpreting, but staying in the present, exploring how materials and relationship make with me at this moment in time.

Similarly to Barad (2007), Cooke is outlining a deliberate move away from a representational mode of thinking, foregrounding instead the researcher’s embodied entanglement in the data and research process. Taking up aspects of this, I sought playful ways to work with the musicians, considering them as research collaborators, playing with objects, sounds and sensations experienced in our co-becomings during workshops. I extended this approach to the data, experimenting with different ways to be in playful encounter with it, resisting the call of interpretation and representation, exploring different possibilities for listening, attending carefully to what arose from our intra-actions (Cooke 2020). My own role as researcher is therefore entangled, sometimes as an observer / listener to music making on and with Zoom, at other times as a collaborator and maker with the musicians, staff, and with the emergent data.

The research was given ethical permission by the University of Exeter ethics committee (Ref D1920-092 [07-20]). Permission was voluntary and pseudonyms are used to protect the identity of participants. All participants gave consent to participate: the research was introduced to the children with their regular teacher in simple terms and their responses were monitored throughout the research for any signs of dissent to participate. Parents gave written informed consent on their behalf; all participating adults also gave written informed consent.

Musical and other listenings

listen (v.)

If ‘‘to hear’’ is to understand the sense (… to understand at least the rough outline of a situation, a context if not a text), to listen is to be straining toward a possible meaning, and consequently one that is not immediately accessible. (Nancy 2007, 6)

Listening is both a core skill and a pedagogy in many approaches to music education around the world (Schippers 2010): it makes little sense to think about cultivating musicianship without including listening as an intrinsic dimension of playing, creating, or responding to sound. Nancy’s (2007) distinction of listening and hearing helps to refine this by drawing attention to how music education is often concerned with training listening towards a particular type of meaning making, or with hearing a specific type of sense. For example, in England, the National Curriculum for Music (Department for Education 2013, 2), states that children are expected to ‘listen with concentration and understanding to a range of high-quality live and recorded music.’ This implies children are taking initial steps in becoming musically literate: that is, learning to understand the sounds they hear in a musical way. In the National Curriculum, this musical listening might include making sense of sounds by distinguishing them in relation to the ‘interrelated dimensions of music,’ (2), meaning qualities of the sound such as pitch, pulse, dynamic, timbre, texture etc. It also implies that sounds might be understood in relation to a musical canon, suggested by the descriptor ‘high-quality music’. Children are learning to distinguish these musical sounds from non-musical sounds and also from less-musical sounds (those relating to ‘low quality’ music for instance).

This kind of listening was apparent in the early years music project I was researching. The project was introduced to early years staff with an emphasis on how workshops could cultivate ‘musical skills’, linking directly to the language of the National Curriculum amongst other established musical pedagogies (both Reggio-Emilia and Kodály-informed approaches were apparent in the project conception and delivery). This also suggested resistance to a tendency to emphasise the capacity of music to develop skills in other areas of children’s learning such as social development, language development, literacy and numeracy, sometimes at the cost of considering musical skills as valuable in themselves. The project was therefore given a strong musical framing, with ‘listening’ as a core skill being developed.

This musical listening might be seen as representative of a humanist education, in which children are gradually drawn towards an understanding of the sense of music as musically literate adults. Viewed from a posthuman standpoint, some limitations of this can be suggested. Hackett (2021, 69) argues that if emergent literacy is only about young children starting to join the literacy practices of adults, then literacy is, ‘a process of socialisation – a human-centric endeavour in which those who are ‘more’ human (educated, literate adults), improve or support the socialisation of those who are ‘less’ human (illiterate, illogical toddlers).’ There is a danger of children’s own literacy practices being ‘colonised’ (Arculus 2020, 64) by those of adults, thus limiting the possibilities for difference, diversity and the emergence of new knowledge or understanding. Hackett (2021, 68) argues instead for giving greater attention to children’s own literacy practices – not as adults in the making, but extending ‘beyond adult socialization.’

Music education has also been criticised for seeing children as ‘immature adults who are undergoing a process of ‘becoming’ musical’ (Young and Illari 2019, 3). However, engaging with musicianship in a more child-centric than adult-centric way is much more mainstream in scholarship in this domain. More recent work in particular concerns itself with children as actors within their own musical worlds, ‘“being” musical’ (Young and Illari 2019, 3; Nyland 2019; Young 2016). Hackett (2021) describes engaging with children’s own (word-based) literacy practices by considering the multiple simultaneous possible meanings that can be attached to young children’s vocalizations, not all of which relate to words or communication. Musically this seems uncontroversial: Young (2003, 88–92), writing 20 years ago, provided a loose taxonomy of vocal play from ‘free-flow spontaneous singing’ through to ‘chanting’, ‘reworking songs’, ‘movement vocalising’, ‘vocal dramas’, ‘imitating sounds’ and ‘imitating singing style.’ These move considerably beyond vocalisation understood only as proto-speech. As an emerging musical literacy, they imply a trajectory not towards adult-singing in the making, but rather from a baby’s spontaneous vocalising, with a sense of this being extended upwards to older children’s musical practices.

The step that Hackett (2021, 69) suggests which could move this existing musical practice into more posthuman territory, is a focus on what she describes as the ‘‘wildness’ … or multiplicity of what happens between children and materials.’ Here she is describing the aspects of children’s literacy practices that seem to operate ‘beyond human intentionality, beyond reason and rationality, caught up in the more-than-human world’ (67-68). Returning to music, this moves away from both adult-centric and child-centric music-making, opening instead towards a broad sense of relationality with materiality both human and other-than-human in music-making. This holds potential for opening and multiplying creative possibilities. Applied to an analysis of children’s play in museum spaces, Hackett and Somerville (2017) contrast their approach where words, vocalisations and environmental noises are all considered equally, with one that focuses on what we ‘hear’ which they describe as already socio-culturally constructed.

In the case of my research, both starting with a posthuman theoretical framework and the encounter with the materiality of Zoom called for alternative listening practices. Early observations were disrupted in their encounters with Zoom. I observed that through this encounter, children were rendered ‘unknowable fuzzy creatures’ (from field notes) in the research: two-dimensional, pixilated, blurring one into the other, part fleshy, part digital, occasionally part of a collective band of sound, sometimes echoing or delayed, often silent. Approaching this as a ruption in my usual listening to children’s music making, I needed to find new ways of listening that would help me to engage more fully with the ‘wildness’ that was present in the emergent sound world.

It is here that Davies’ (2014, 21) concept of ‘emergent listening’ is particularly useful. Davies characterises usual listening, particularly that in which adults listen to children, as listening ‘in order to fit what we hear into what we already know’ (21) – a practice of holding things the same, focused on regularity and repetition. By contrast, she describes ‘emergent listening’ as opening up:

the ongoing possibility of coming to see life, and one’s relation to it, in new and surprising ways. Emergent listening might begin with what is known, but it is open to creatively evolving into something new. (21)

I found when trying to listen to children on Zoom, I was often frustrated by not being able to hear them, by not being able to distinguish individual children, and by the sound being ‘flattened’ so that sounds I wanted (expected) to hear were not foregrounded and nuances of children’s music-making were inaudible: my efforts to fit what I heard into what I already knew were problematic. In response to this, I developed my own practice of emergent listening within my research, drawing on Davies’ (2014) work. I invite you to take a break in your reading here, and to join in me in some listening:

Listen!

Shhhhhhhh

Close your eyes

Stretch your ears

 

 

 

Breathe out – aaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaa

Quiet

 

 

 

Listen again!

 

 

 

Feel the space you are in

Listen to it with your whole body

Listen with all your being

Be with your listening

Open yourself to it

 

 

 

Breathe out again – mmmmmmmmmm

Quiet

 

 

 

Take some time

 

 

 

What has emerged?

 

 

 

Some sounded annotations:

whoosh rush swoosh dut dut dut shwoosh

brrrrruuuu-tssssss-brrrrruuuu

df df df df df

brrrrrr pause

brrrrrrr-rrrr pause

brrrrrrrrr

tink

t-k-t-k-t-k-t-k-t-k-t-k-t-k-t-k-t-k-t-k-t-k-t-k-t-k-t-k-t-k-t-k-t-k-t-k-t

ouuuuee d d d d d

Here I am describing an open-ended listening, a listening to what may emerge, which is a description of my practice of emergent listening in this research. I am outlining my process of quietening my preconceptions, my existing habits of listening, and opening myself up, slowing down interpretation, being vulnerable to the experience of listening. The ‘sounded annotations’ are a documentation of some listening using this process. They illustrate how emergent listening might enhance the resonant capacity of sound to hold meaning open. I am both inviting a musical listening, one that is ‘gathered and scrutinized for itself … musically listened to … as a resonant meaning’ (Nancy 2007, 7), but also a non-musical listening, a listening that may go in any number of different directions, might experience sounds in different ways, building and discarding meanings, suggesting, implying, playing with, generating and dissolving new worlds in its emerging and merging with human and non-human others. Sound invites a listening both discursive and material – a listening to music, a listening to a drama, a narrative, a social commentary, an affective becoming, a sensory experience, an emergent language, a listening to a sound that meets our bodies and co-becomes with us as something new. I am suggesting that the materiality of sound and a creative act of listening together may open towards a multiplicity of new possibilities, of worlds in the making that hold potential both for early years research and for practice.

Co-becoming a screen-play: A commentary

In the next section of the article I put this practice of emergent listening to work, considering its potential to impact on processes of documentation in early years music research and practice. I build on Davies’ (2014) articulation of the danger that documentation may close down emergent listening in early years practice: observing a photograph of a child pointing towards a flower she notes how this could be a demonstration of the potential of a camera to capture a moment of spontaneity, or it could equally be an example of the teacher or indeed the camera itself, exerting their agency, pushing the child towards what is photographable. If the latter is the case, she argues that the documentation is being utilised to hold the status quo in place, to shut down emergent listening. Davies describes how the converse is also possible, that open-ended uses of documentation can be used to promote emergent listening, keeping learning in motion and alive.

In my research, the boundary between practice and documentation was porous: children and other human participants entangled with technology, co-becoming as various combinations of human-screen-Zoom-data. Everything was recorded, so live action became documentation in a continuous flow: I liberally considered all of this as data. It therefore seemed particularly important to think carefully about how I could stay in playful relation with this emerging documentation/data, how I could use emergent listening to keep the data lively, to allow different things to emerge.

Drawing on MacLure’s (2010) concept of ‘glow moments’ to work through the data from one project session, I selected fragments that, to paraphrase MacLure’s words, gathered my attention, held my gaze and made me pause to explore further. Collecting these together, I explored their resonances, their potential as documentation to open up further creative movement through collaging them in different ways. I discovered that each ‘glowing’ fragment had something to say about the way that the screen in Zoom had become a theatre for action, or a theatre that provokes action, a classroom of its own, a frame in which to create an image. Following Adams and Thompson’s (2016) advice on interviewing digital objects, I created a series of playful short stories or anecdotes about the screen which highlight its entanglement with the human and other participants in this emerging online early years music education practice. In keeping with these suggestions from the data, this is presented as a ‘screen-play’ which I suggest viewing before reading the reflective commentary that follows.

Link to a Screen-Play of Early Years Music Making on Zoom During a Pandemic: https://sway.office.com/zSeRXBLJAlA5NpeM?ref=Link&loc=play

Neideck et al. (2021, 52) draw attention to some characteristics of a Zoom window:

Like an actual window, it is designed to be used two-ways, for gazing and witnessing simultaneously. It requires at least two bodies in mutual gaze, and although there are many spaces in which these bodies exist, they come together in the ‘real’ place of the digital window, which controls time, perspective, and participation.

This analysis is written by theatre practitioners reflecting on their online practice; as such it draws us towards reading the screen as a theatre. In their analysis, such digital windows can operate as heterotopia: spaces that are ‘absolutely other … real places outside of all places’ that may ‘juxtapose … several spaces that would normally be incompatible’ (Vidler et al. 2014, 20–21). Both conceiving of Zoom as a digital window and conceiving the window as a heterotopia foregrounds the agency of the Zoom windows within this early years music practice. Zoom defines the space, constructing its heterotopia-like character and controlling ‘time, perspective and participation’ (Neideck et al. 2021, 52) for its participants. Far from being a neutral mediator, Zoom pulls its participants into this real but other space.

Like a heterotopia, similarly to a theatre space, there is an entanglement of material and imaginary, co-becoming with the Zoom screen. This is visible in the construction of the real spaces within the Zoom space: each window presents a selected perspective, a directed gaze on the real spaces represented. Musician Clare and Bluebird are framed by two bluebird-cushions; Bluebird and Goldfinch can appear and disappear from the window as required for their game.

We can also see real and imaginary entangled in the performative dimensions of actions from the human participants. Neideck et al. (2021, 53) go on to qualify their characterisation of the ‘mutual gaze’ through the Zoom window. They note that unlike a real window, a Zoom window does not support true reciprocity of gaze; as such they find themselves exhausted by trying to ‘discover unnatural ways to look natural.’ They are working hard to perform ‘looking natural’, bringing together a real and an imaginary presentation of themselves as themselves. Similarly in the early years project, the Zoom window imposed a performative character onto the action. The human participants all have moments of playful performance in the screen-play: embodied becoming different characters with different voices and musics. As one child sees themselves on screen they temporarily inhabit the role of both gaze and witness simultaneously; a delighted confusion of real and not-real emerging between child and screen.

At other times the performative character of the action imposed by Zoom seems more problematic. An intervention by music occurs in the screen-play, specifically enacted by ‘Pitch’. Vulnerabilities around the voice have been emerging from the outset of the project and they have gradually been catalysing around the ominous character of Pitch: how can the early years staff be encouraged to move their voices up closer to the pitch of the children’s voices without the physical presence of the musicians in the space to give them the confidence, or the sonic cover they need to try it out? Zoom resists efforts from the musicians to throw the pitch towards the staff and it ricochets back; as if in a badly-sounded echo chamber, their efforts keep redoubling on top of themselves. The gaze of Zoom is like a magnifying glass on this drama; early years staff are not only trying to catch pitch from the musicians, they are also trying to perform pitch to the musicians. I notice in writing this a polarising binary of musician / non-musician that loiters unhelpfully in the background of the text, another performative narrative undermining the pitch-performances from early years staff (Rickard and Chin 2017).

The ‘attempt by music to reassert itself’ (a sound collage, see Sway) is ‘composed’ from several encounters between musicians, Pitch, repertoire, instruments, reflections and in the middle, a brief participation from myself.

Pitch encounters in the intervention include:

• A ‘sound bath’: part of a musical warm up for some reflections with the music-leaders. We tried a short improvisation via Zoom based on the falling minor-third interval (so-mi, the simple vocal shape characteristic of the Kodály method). Although our internet connections proved too unstable to develop the improvisation in a satisfying way, a fragment of this recording becomes the backbone of the track.

• Extracts from a workshop: ‘Pitch work’ that was highlighted through the glow-moment process. You can hear the musicians singing ‘ready steady off we go’ at pitch to start each song; repertoire based on the so-mi interval; ‘mi re do’ repeated on bells, voice, voice with numbers, recorder; pitched hellos and goodbyes.

• Doggy doggy: at the end of the project the musicians and I visited the setting in person. For part of the session, we sat in a large circle, singing songs. The musicians led a call and response song, ‘Doggy doggy where’s my bone.’ To model it, they sang the ‘call’ and I sang the ‘response’, suddenly self-conscious to be singing a solo – the two-note ‘so-mi’ that was at the heart of these pitch encounters. What if I sang it out of tune? I included this moment of my own encounter with pitch-panic in the track as well.

In ‘Scene 2,’ it seems the musical intervention has derailed the action which now simply draws out some of the pitch intra-actions further. I experienced the performative character of the musical intervention as a constant chorus of anxieties about singing in tune. Like an opera chorus, the voices expressing these anxieties become almost collectivised, broader entities rather than individual characters in the drama expressing their thoughts, as do the reassurances of the ‘musicians.’

Pitch remained centre stage as the musicians and I worked with some of the vivid sensations / emotions we had felt during the workshop. Considering how the sensation might make us move or shape our bodies, we took turns to join each other in that moving, gradually exaggerating it, and adding sounds to it. This was a further experimentation with emergent listening as a research method, practicing a ‘stretching [of our] ears, and all [our] senses … a focused attention, an intensification of attention to the other, and to the happening in-between’ (Davies 2014, 42). In the screen-play, a moment of relief around not having to pitch is re-lived, but co-becoming with the theatre-windows of Zoom, the movements shift and take on their own character – the ‘pitch’ moment thus extends into something new and the action continues … 

Possibilities emerging from the pandemic as a ruption in early years music-making practices

Through utilising an ‘emergent listening’ approach informed by posthuman theory, I have drawn attention to the potential to widen our gaze, to open our ears within early years music-making research and practice to incorporate a broader set of players. These have included both younger and older humans and also a range of digital, technological and sonic participants. I have reflected on how the introduction of musical practices on Zoom during the pandemic brought to light some problematics in perceiving children making music ‘as usual’ and used posthuman theory to explore the potential of the pandemic as a ruption, provoking new possibilities. This has highlighted a broad range of intra-actions in the practice: the focus is not on an individual child on a trajectory towards becoming a musical adult, but is instead on a more diverse set of co-becomings incorporating the multiple human and other-than-human participants in the project. Voices which may be marginalised by a more standardized approach have been included, and their inclusion has brought about new learning. I have also looked at how emergent listening can guide a more playful process of reflection and documentation, holding listening open so that thinking and practice may keep on the move. To extend the emphasis on emergence, I conclude by offering reflections on questions that have been raised in the research, particularly through the development of the ‘screen-play’. By contrast to research questions which I might have stated at the outset and now attempt to answer, these are questions from research – an articulation lines of enquiry that emerged, extended as invitations to reflect further.

What is the role of the screen in an early years music-making practice on Zoom?

By incorporating the challenge of Zoom (and in particular the screen) as a creative player in the research I have highlighted how it may instead become a space of possibility (the screen-play). McCarthy and Ryan (2022, 148), exploring the potentials of the Zoom Room in a higher education context, describe it as ‘a diffractive aperture into a Zoom-I-Verse, a temporal site of rhythmic, reframing re-worldings of research dissemination within a video conferencing space.’ Similarly, I kept my attention on what the screen has been doing – on how it has been diffracting or entangling with the co-creative emergence of new early years practices in the post-pandemic world. Through ‘allowing ideas to surface’ (Cooke 2020, 407) in my own encounters with the screen-data, I have commented on some of its technological performances (McCarthy and Ryan, 2022). It has provoked performative dimensions of music-making that have co-become with voices and anxieties and coalesced in particular around the concept of pitch. At the same time it has become a screen for action, prompting a theatrical playfulness, a space in which different characters can emerge, appearing and disappearing in fluctuating musical becomings. It has constructed a space that is apart from the real spaces that are brought together on its surface, creating ambiguous mergings of reality and imagination that hold ongoing potential for further invention. The question remains open – what may become of/with/in intra-action with the screen next, what further ruptions might it enact in early years settings in its anarchic cutting through of boundaries, musical and clangorous, real and imaginary, professional and domestic? A ruption can sometimes be imposed upon us, and sometimes it can be sought out for its generative potential in learning. I suggest that the screen, arriving through the imposed ruption of the pandemic, subsequently became a more active creative player in the practice, a creative ruption offering new possibilities for learning.

What other materialities have been important in this practice and what might attending to them make possible?

Through listening with posthuman theory, and in particular through utilising emergent listening (Davies 2014), I have given a more equal attention to the actions and potentials of the diverse materialities within the research and practice. I wonder what is made possible by these materialities, how they might ‘intra-actively shape what occurs’ (Haraway 2015, 6). The role of sound, of our bodies, and of our affective engagement with the practice have all played their parts. The intra-action of these three has led towards the falling minor third being given its own role, emerging beyond its place in a fixed understanding of musical development, allowed to reveal its creative and affective potentials. The resonance of the moment of release from this interval offered to early years staff sparked for me further questions about how their professionalism and values were recognised and utilised during the project. I draw attention to this as a moment in which the ruption of the pandemic was able to both bring to light existing power relations, and also, through subsequent emergences, to suggest ways to re-order them through attending differently (Chappell, Turner, and Wren 2024). Osgood (2006) characterises a neoliberal discourse of professionalism as performative, individualist and rational, and contrasts this with an ethic of care in the professional practice of early years staff, characterised by collaboration, altruism, affectivity, and conscientiousness. Drawing this back towards musical practice, it provokes reflection on how the emotional labour of caring during a pandemic could be amplified further and how this could be creatively woven into the fabric of music-making of which the staff were a part.

How can documentation in early years music practices be used to extend creative possibilities?

Following Davies (2014) reflections on using documentation to facilitate emergent listening, I experimented with a creative approach, utilising sonic and visual collaging and allowing miniature anecdotes to develop as part of a ‘screen-play’ which produced uncertain knowledge, combining ‘factual’ reflection with imagination. I use the word uncertainty as a positive attribute in research, allowing emergent listening to guide me towards knowledge that is itself emergent, ambiguous, complex (Somerville 2008). Mirroring posthuman deconstructions of linear notions of learning as a pre-mapped journey towards becoming a (more human) musically literate adult, I embrace instead Somerville’s (2008) starting point for research: ‘How can I open myself to what I do not yet know?’ (210). Giamminuti, Merewether, and Blaise (2021) critique the use of pedagogical documentation for having reverted to a reductive tool utilised primarily to show accountability to curriculum. They argue that in its original Reggio Emilia conception, values foregrounded were by contrast, ‘encounter, interdependency, interconnectedness, difference … complexity and possibility’ (441) which hold the potential to democratically transform practice. I suggest that posthuman theory and emergent listening have helped to foreground these qualities in the research, and I open the question of how similar approaches could be integrated more closely into processes of documentation that are integral to this model of musical practice with young children and professional development for staff. Such an approach would support what the Department for Education (2023) itself describes as ‘effective learning’ (13) that it characterises as playful, active, creative and critical.

What might an effort to stay attuned to that which is emergent reveal?

Davies (2014) states that, ‘Emergent listening opens up the possibility of new ways of knowing and new ways of being, both for those who listen and those who are listened to’ (21-22). I have laid out in this article my own journey of needing to listen differently when researching during a pandemic. In so doing I have had to let go of my own normative conception of a child making music and become more immersed in the sounds of a collective experience of an early years music project on Zoom. Making this shift has been reflected in moving from a frustration at an inability to distinguish the music making of individual children towards a focus on encounters between an array of different human and non-human participants. Through the ‘screen-play’ and commentary I have described how this has helped me to be able to see an emerging practice which was richly steeped in children’s theatre, in characterisation, in the imaginative, and in which aspects of music education such as curriculum and ‘pitch’ were present but played more marginal and subversive roles than I had expected. Through this description I have illustrated how engaging with a diversity of ways of knowing and being through emergent listening has not avoided a sense of ‘unpredictability and discomfort’ (Chappell, Turner, and Wren 2024, 3) in the face of change, but has helped to utilise it as a source of creative energy. Arculus (2020) argues that children are experts in the emergent in their ‘vital capability’ (61) to be in relationship with the present moment. Through this research practice I am thus suggesting not just a way of listening to children, but rather an approach of listening with children, learning from their expertise, opening new possibilities and keeping our understanding on the move.

Acknowledgements

I am very grateful to all of the participants in this project for contributing their time and expertise, and to the manager of the project described for supporting this research. For the purpose of open access, the author has applied a Creative Commons Attribution (CC BY) licence to any Author Accepted Manuscript version arising from this submission.

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No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

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Ursula Crickmay

Ursula Crickmay developed and managed arts education programmes with artists and arts organisations for several years before moving into higher education. She now teaches Creative Arts Education and works on research in creative education at the University of Exeter. She is also studying for a PhD in which her research focus is on posthuman theory and creative music workshop practices. Ursula studied music, and community music, at the University of York.