The musical art of infant conversation: Narrating in the time of sympathetic experience, without rational interpretation, before words

Infants, like adults and many animals, move with rhythmic gestures that express motive states and changes of emotion and mood. But the communications of babies have a special creativity and message power. Infants are ready at birth to take turns in a “dialogue” of movements with a loving parent. They are attracted to extended engagement with human gestures, and sympathetic to many emotions — resonating to the impulses and qualities of movement; imitating, seeking to play an active part in proto-conversations or playful duets of agency (Trevarthen, 1999). When the expressive forms are examined in detail, infant and partner are found to be sharing a subtle “musicality” of communication (Malloch, 1999). Very soon the early musical games become the habits or conventions of a mini-culture, improvised creations of meaning for each pair, of the kind that Maya Gratier calls a “proto-habitus” (Gratier, 2007). They become treasured memories of a special relationship.