Infant Musicality

What can infants hear? What are their reactions to music? Is it useful for them to sing and listen to music? Is their auditory sensitivity developed before their birth? At what age do they start singing, and clapping their hands? How can their musical development be improved? These (and other) questions are present in today''s debate on music education and the responses are normally given in an intuitive way. It is now necessary and urgent to sketch a developmental profile of infants, starting from their earliest manifestations. In the last 30 years, research in this field has been progressively developed. In most cases research has been devoted to single aspects of more complex problems. Moreover, it has been based on non-homogeneous categories of subjects and by different methods. Motivated by the fact that many open problems need to be solved, Professor Tafuri decided, in 1998, to begin a longitudinal research project devoted to studying the musical development in children from 0 to