The MoMu grid: Towards a complementary analysis of Movements and Music elements during the interactions among toddlers

In recent years research on musical development underlines the presence of musicality in the vocal gestures especially, but not only, in the child/mother interactions (Stern 1985, Papousěk H. & Papousěk M. 1996, Trevarthen & Malloch 2000, Nakata & Trehub 2004, Imberty 2009). Instead the research on the movement analysis puts largely attention on the dance movements, the role of the body during the performance or on the rhythmic analysis, and the few studies on the movements of very young children are for therapeutic aims. The aim of the study, introduced in this paper, is to investigate the role of the body and voice in the early interactions among toddlers and the way used by them to communicate. A grid to analyze the correlation voice/movement was created using the Motor Laban theory: the MoMu Grid. To create the grid, we collected the video of the observations carried out with 15 children of 14 months old in two nursery schools in Bologna. The children were divided in 3 groups and they were free to move and play. All sessions were recorded with two cameras: one was steady, while the other was mobile. All data collected are analyzed using the MoMu grid: to observe the movements we used several elements of the Laban categories: energy, flow, spatial dimension, and especially the concept of “effort”. To analyze the musical characteristics of vocal gestures (pitch, intensity, rhythm, etc) we used the grid created in our previous study to observe the used of the voice during the daily routine (Ferrari & Addessi 2009).