The home musical environment: Overview of studies, current trends and propositions for future directions

Understanding the funds of musical knowledge, abilities and identities children bring with them from their homes and families is important because they provide the foundations for musical learning. Thus, over the last two decades, studying the home musical environment (HME) has become an increasing focus of interest for early childhood music educators. In this article, I first look back over studies of the HME describing the methods, reporting the types of information gathered and identifying some broad trends. While earlier methods relied mainly on data collected in survey and interview methods or, in a few studies, small-scale observational methods, recent advances in digital devices are enabling the collection of continuous audio data from the home environment. This recent cohort of studies, due to their enhanced ability to reveal what is taking place musically, are providing important insights into the nature of everyday musical experiences for babies and young children. These insights are adding to, modifying and sometimes contradicting earlier studies based on parental self-report or limited ethnographic data. I develop my discussion of broad trends and offer some propositions for future directions by incorporating what I learned from a secondary analysis of a corpus of audio data made publicly available by Fausey and Mendoza, supplemented by information drawn from home visits to mothers with young children aged 8 months to 3 years. Drawing mainly on these two sources, I argue that home and family are not stable entities but change over time, so the methods, concepts and theories that we apply to explore and interpret the HME need to keep in step with one another.