Between Digital Music Culture and Musical Heritage: A Critical Narrative Review of Preschool Children’s Musical Socialisation

Preschool children’s musical lives are increasingly formed across interrelated family, educational, community and digital environments. Yet research has usually examined early musical development, family music-making, digital childhood and short-video platforms as separate domains. This critical narrative review investigates how digitally circulated musical content—using TikTok as an illustrative case—interacts with embodied, intergenerational and culturally situated forms of musical transmission during the preschool years. The source base was assembled purposively and iteratively around four intersecting domains: early musical socialisation; young children’s digital practices and family mediation; short-form audiovisual platforms; and music, identity and intangible cultural heritage. The review does not claim exhaustive systematic coverage; rather, it compares heterogeneous conceptual, empirical and institutional sources relevant to the questions under examination. The heterogeneous evidence was analysed through thematic coding and comparative theoretical synthesis rather than statistical aggregation. Five themes were developed: changing agents of musical socialisation; the affordances and limits of short-form audiovisual music; family mediation and unequal conditions of access; embodied participation and intergenerational cultural transmission; and the emerging role of early-childhood education. The literature supports neither a deterministic account of digital harm nor an idealised opposition between technology and tradition. Direct evidence concerning preschool children’s engagement with TikTok remains limited, and findings from older populations cannot be transferred uncritically to young children. Nevertheless, the synthesis indicates that musical socialisation now occurs within a hybrid ecology in which platform-circulated sounds coexist with singing, movement, play, family repertoires and community practices. The review proposes a relational and developmentally appropriate pedagogical approach: digital musical material should be selectively transformed into active listening, movement, improvisation, comparison and cultural inquiry, while live shared music-making remains central. Implications are offered for teacher education, family-school-community cooperation, curriculum development and future empirical research.