Usually when we think about the ways that music can foster intimacy and strengthen relationships, we think about love songs. You might imagine sitting next to someone you care about and putting on the right piece of music in the background. And hoping that that will influence the mood so that your loving feelings towards one another are housed in a more comfortable environment. Now that kind of thinking is not what we're going to talk about in this unit. Because that assumes a belief that music does something to you and will lead to having the effect that you want. And that was the focus that we adopted in unit one when we looked at how music can influence the body. In this unit we're exploring the ways that each of us has the capacity to draw on our innate musicality. In order to foster intimacy in relationships with those that we love. The relationship that best illustrates that love is the one that occurs first. An attachment theorist suggests that the foundations we develop for all subsequent relationships begin in our experience of this first love. In the relationship between parent and infant. As you will see in our footage of Julia e Santiago d'Italia, the ways that parents interact with their infants is almost always musical. Whether its the way we sway and bounce our babies to sleep using lullabies and rhythms, or the way we play and read together. This early intimate encounters have many musical features. And you will also see that the ways they sing and play instruments together has many communicative features. And it's on this basis that the label communicative musicality has been coined by researchers Colwyn Trevarthen and Stephen Malloch. We've interviewed Stephen Malloch for this unit about communicative musicality. And the intrinsically musical nature of human interaction. As Helen Shoemark describes in her review article on voices, baby talk, or infant-directed speech, has been explored by a range of researchers and theorists over time. The interactions between mother and infant have been coded, and quantified, and counted, and examined, all around the world, with very similar outcomes. And note that I say mother and child. Because one of the limitations of the research is that, with few exceptions, researchers have relied on data from mothers interacting with their babies. In the review article by Elizabeth McLean, also available on the Voices website. She points out how this reliance on mother and baby data potentially limits what we can truly know about the relationship between parents and infants. Because we've really only looked at one half of that in the case of families with a mother and a father. But even though it's called baby talk, it's not really like talking at all. It's more like an embodied story, an exchange of emotions that is expressed through what Daniel Stern called vitality contours. A form of encounter that expresses our authentic being in relationship with one another. When parents and babies are interacting, in what Donald Winnicott famously describes as good enough, the parent is not actually directing the baby and teaching them how to speak and communicate in the future. They are being attuned and responsive in order to provide the child with a sense of power and being in control. And although attachment theorists like Winnicott assume that responsibility lies solely in the hand of the parent, communicative musicality research documents how this is a co-created mutual encounter, to which the baby also contributes. This is more in keeping with Martin Buber's philosophical emphasis on dialogue, rather than the more referential notion of communication. Emphasising love over the psychological construct of development. And the way this intimate relationship is performed changes over time. As the relationship grows and develops its own unique narrative. With all kinds of sweet, identifiable patterns that recur and change and develop over time. So each time a parent and infant interacts, like goo goo gaa gaa, it doesn't occur out of nowhere, it's contextually laden. So if in the previous communication the baby has responded well to goo goo gaa gaa then it's highly likely that the parent is going to try and bring goo goo gaa gaa gaa gaa into the next encounter and see if it has the same reaction. And so communicative musicality describes what emerges in our earliest intimate relationships. With what Steven Malloch has identified as three inherently musical elements of pulse, quality, and narrative.