O desenvolvimento da percepção do tempo em crianças de dois a seis anos: um estudo a partir do canto espontâneo

Abstract

INTRODUCTION: Spontaneous singing is the vocal music, spontaneously produced by children from 18 months old, not yet well unknown by the academics. Recent studies have shown that spontaneous singing can be considered a way of representation, such as drawing and language. The premise that music is a temporal manifestation of Art led to the possibility to integrate music, children and time, in a same research. OBJECTIVES: To delineate time concepts along history; to identify the relationships between time and music; to study the theories of musical development and the cognitive development of children from two to six years old; to describe spontaneous singing natural evolution from birth to six years old; to establish musicalcategories in order to verify the relationship between spontaneous singing and time perception in children from two to six years old. FRAMEWORK: Damasio (2009), Whitrow (1993) and Minkowski (1972) were chosen for time perception; Langer (1953) for the relationship between time and music; Piagets developmental theory was a reference to investigate childrens cognitive development. For theoretical framework on musical development, Howard Gardner (1973), Hans Joachim Koellreutter (1984), Keith Swanwick (1988) and David Hargreaves (1996) theories were elected. METODOLOGY: Product analysis was used to carry out this investigation. Forty childrens spontaneous songs were selected and musically analyzed by twelve judges. Eight musicalcategories emerged from the analyses: rhythmic structures, direction, form, melodic structures, expressive character, contrasts, text, and specific cultural influences. Finally, the relationship between spontaneous singing and time perception was checked. FINDINGS: The characteristics of spontaneous singing go through evident transformations along this period. The treatment given to time, present throughout the eight categories, was one of the main transformations. The progressive intensification of rhythmic regularity, the emphasis in the contrasts and the strength of the conclusions were the most emphasized transformations. CONCLUSIONS: Music is an importantmethodological tool to investigate children development ; spontaneous singing may be considered an indicator of both, time perception and general cognitive development in children. Spontaneous singing is likely to be used as a propaedeutic tool to follow childrens development. For this reason, an outline of a protocol, to be developed in further studies, was proposed.