Children's Expression of Emotion in Song

Abstract

Children 4-12 years of age (N = 160) were recorded (audio and video) as they sang two versions of a familiar song, once in an attempt to make an adult listener happy and once to make her sad. Coding of gestural, vocal, linguistic and musical devices revealed that children used all of these means to portray contrastive emotions. Regardless of age or singing skill, children relied primarily on expressive devices used in interpersonal communication (e.g. tempo, facial expression) and made relatively little use of music-specific devices (e.g. legato). Moreover, they used a greater variety of expressive devices in their sad performances than in their happy performances. Finally, age-related changes reflected the influence of maturity, socialisation and musical knowledge.