Theorizing musical childhoods with illustrations from a study of girls’ karaoke use at home

Abstract

Information and insights concerning children’s everyday musical practices in the middle years of childhood are beginning to develop across a number of disciplines, but as yet they are fragmented and have had little impact on music education practice. There is a need to find a conceptual framework capable of integrating information from different disciplines, including the psycho-pedagogical perspectives that have tended hitherto to be the dominating perspectives in education. In this article I propose that childhood studies, specifically drawing on the theoretical perspective of Alan Prout, offer a conceptual framework for this purpose. Accordingly, musical childhoods are conceived as ‘assemblages’ constituted by biological, material/technological and social elements. The discussion in this article was motivated and is illustrated by a small-scale study that investigated singing with karaoke, in particular karaoke video games, at home among children aged between 6 and 11 years living in a rural area of the UK.