Maya Gratier and Colwyn Trevarthen

Musical Narrative and Motivesfor Culture in Mother–Infant

Vocal Interaction

[...] one of the most ubiquitous and powerful discourse forms in human

communication is narrative. Narrative structure is even inherent in the

praxis of social interaction before it achieves linguistic expression.

(Bruner, 1990, p. 77).

It takes about twelve months before a linguistic consciousness begins

to emerge in the human infant. But this momentous accession to a

realm of meaning where sounds and relations between sounds stand

for things and events in symbolic ways crucially depends on a prehis-

tory of meaningful communication by more direct, or more essential,

means. The mastery of language enabling the discrete labelling of

intentions, desires and beliefs with precise reference to non-present

objects and events is generally associated with the singular develop-

ment of human culture. Language and cultural knowledge are deemed

to be two of the most distinctively human abilities. Thus having a con-

sciousness of culture might depend on the child being able to under-

stand words and speak, to partake in the conversational negotiation of

norms and plans of action in talk or text. But well before infants start

experimenting with newly acquired sounds of language, before they

attend to the specific syllables that must be strung together to form a

word standing for something in a local world of meaning held-in-

common, they are involved in a non verbal semiosis of mimetic

expression and sympathetic action, which is already distinctly human

(Trevarthen, 1990; 1994).

Journal of Consciousness Studies, 15, No. 10–11, 2008, pp. 122–58

Correspondence:mgratier@u-paris10.fr, gratier@gmail.com, c.trevarthen@ed.ac.uk

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In the vocal ‘protoconversations’ (Bateson, 1979; Trevarthen,

1974) that start to liven spontaneous interactions a few weeks after

birth, infants show a precocious sense of rhythm and an interest in

the qualities of intention and interest in mothers’ sounds. A growing

control of breath and vocal projection enhances mastery over vocal

production through modulation of pitch, intensity and timbre. In

lively exchanges involving both vocal and whole body actions,

infants begin to express their states of engagement and to sense feel-

ings and purposeful states of mind in others (Reddy, 2008).

This paper is concerned with the forms of meaningful engagement

that emerge in vocal interactions with preverbal infants, in particular

with the narrative organisation of coordinated expression in time. We

relate culture and meaning in preverbal exchange to an ‘implicit

knowing’ involving nonconscious habits, procedures and patterns

(Gratier, 2001; Stern, 2004) derived from direct perception of the pur-

poseful and coordinated body mouvements of self and other, or what

Stein Bråten (1988; 1998) has termed ‘felt immediacy’. Shared focus

and affective involvement with the expressions of another in observ-

able interpersonal interaction attest to the unique intersubjective

awareness that leads infants to participate in the activity of culture.

With Jerome Bruner (1990) we believe that narrative is a fundamental

mode of human collective thinking — and acting — and that its basic

function is the production of meaning or ‘world making’.

We first attempt to redefine the boundaries of the term ‘narrative’ to

include ‘narratives without words’ based on processes of temporal

organisation in language and music. In the second section of the paper,

we describe what we take to be indices of a narrative organisation in

live mother–infant interaction based on its ‘communicative musicality’.

The third section presents the speculative claim that the interactions

between young infants and adults are not only narrative in form but also

present a narrative content of ‘common sense’ based on what we call a

‘proto-habitus’. In the fourth and fifth sections we present some

empirical evidence for the narrative organisation of both spontane-

ous mother-infant vocal interaction and interaction based on singing

for and with infants.

I. What is Narrative Without Words?

Narrative is most often considered a language-based way of telling a

story, and studies of verbal narrative, including both written and oral

forms of ‘telling’, are typically concerned with elements of structure,

coherence-producing linguistic devices and individual modes of

MUSICAL NARRATIVE AND MOTIVES 123

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production. Verbal narratives have been shown to present a number of

central features, such as deliberate action, a plot including trouble and

its resolution, protagonists and a narrator (Burke, 1945; Herman, 2007;

Propp, 1928; Sartre, 1947), some of which have, however, been seri-

ously challenged in sophisticated 20th century genres of fiction, theatre

and poetry.

If we examine the history and variety of the activity of human story-

telling we must assume that it is rooted in oral and mimetic traditions –

as tales told in live talk by a ‘literary’ mind that must think and believe

in parables (Turner, 1996). And as an oral tradition, the story is always

situated within, and referring to, a specific socio-cultural context.

Moreover, it is naturally a multi-modal activity involving whole-body

communication of agency. In oral narrative, the narrator moves with

the story, tells and ‘acts’ the story not only with words and proposi-

tions craftily strung together, but also with the complex and subtle

inflections and cadences of voice and with well-coordinated gestures

and body movements expressive of emotion. The narrator is engaged

with an audience who become, through nonverbal participation and

modulations of concentration and involvement, listening co-tellers of

the story (Duranti, 1986). A narrator monitors the ebb and flow of

attention among the listeners, regulates the building of tension and its

release, speeds up or slows down and when necessary clarifies con-

tent. The music and dance of ‘telling’ the story, the performer’s pres-

ent engagement, not just the linguistic construction of themes, motifs

and plot lines as may be represented in the conventional grammar of

text, are crucial aspects of live narrative. In live narrative, it is the

musicality of voice and body that holds listeners’ attention so that they

can be brought simultaneously to share in the experience of a dra-

matic, challenging moment, and brought back together to more famil-

iar situations. Written narrative which came out of oral narrative may

be seen as involving not only cognitive processes of understanding

and remembering but also embodied perceptions of the tension and

drama of shared emotion. Poetic stories link many minds in imagined

space and time.

Narrative is perhaps best understood in the context of performance,

drama and ritual, and there is evidence that these were the meaningful

social activities from which more localized and personal processes of

recounting emerged (Turner, 1982; Dissanayake, 2000). Aristotle saw

the origins of narrative in mimetic behaviour, in the act of re-presentation

as an active dynamic process. According to this view, echoed in

Ricoeur’s important writings (Ricoeur, 1983) and in the theory of

Merlin Donald (2001) who sees transmission of conscious ideas and

124 M. GRATIER AND C. TREVARTHEN

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purposes by mimesis as the evolutionary precursor of communication

in language, narrative must be seen as dynamic, temporally organised

action or praxis, rather than as structure. In this sense, because verbal

narrative invariably involves some form of action, or happening, it

can be seen as being based on a sequencing of nonverbal acts. And this

touches upon a first way in which narratives can be meaningful with-

out words. Repeated chains of gesture, body movement and facial

expression can stimulate shared narrative imagination — a sympathy

for purposeful agency . The kind of wordless narrative we are con-

cerned with, which we think supports infant experience through lov-

ing social interaction, involves reciprocal motivated ‘enactment’

based on intuitively regulated temporal contours of expressive sound

and movement.

Narrative explains, coordinates and retraces trajectories of actions

(Sartre, 1947), and its coherence and unity is based on the ways in

which its parts are related temporally and causally (Ochs, 1997). But

what are the actions or events that make up a narrative? And by what

forces are they held together? The sequential pattern of beginning,

middle and end appears to be a central frame for the narrative process

(Bruner, 2002; Imberty, 2005; Labov, 2001; Ricoeur, 1983). In

language-based narratives, ordered sequences of clauses are related to

the organisation of past events reported by the narrator (Labov &

Waletsky, 1967). It is the particular way in which the elements are

ordered and given ‘energy’ that endows a sequence with narrative

intent. Sequences of events can be considered as units, but they are

inherently interdependent in an economy of energy or vitality (Bruner,

1990; Stern, 1998;1999).

Narrative is also the purposeful basis for making practical and

social meaning in a human world of artefacts, techniques and conven-

tions (Bruner, 1990). It is both rooted in shared histories and it creates

new memories. History and memory, of course, are inherently narra-

tive. Narrative, ‘about’ actors and actions, plays a central role in

almost every conversation (Labov, 2001). Conversational narratives

involve tellers and listeners who can either maintain their respective

roles throughout the narrative episode or can exchange roles in active

alternation as in the collaborative reconstruction of common past

experiences. Elinor Ochs (Ochs, 1997; Ochs & Capps, 2001) has stud-

ied the interactional production of narrative in conversational

discourse and she has shown how social relationships and identities are

negotiated on-line through the collaborative shaping of the stories of

every-day life. Personal identities and cultural histories are narrated and

collaboratively shaped involving many protagonists, present or absent.

MUSICAL NARRATIVE AND MOTIVES 125

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Typically, a narrative is about something worth telling (Bruner,

1990; Labov, 2001). It is about an event involving other persons that a

person feels impelled to recount. A narrator strings together the events

involving protagonists in some unusual state of affairs or ‘fate’.

Bruner and Feldman (1993) describe the simplest form of narrative as

a format involving a canonical steady-state, a precipitating event, a

restoration and a coda. But, as they point out, the mere sequential

nature of events does not in itself generate a narrative experience. The

parts of a narrative sequence must be tied together in a motivating plot

or ‘intrigue’ that sets the whole thing into motion, creating, or express-

ing, what Labov (1972) called ‘lines of dramatic tension’ leading to a

point of closure. Plot can be seen as a motive force that creates the spe-

cial time and energetic flow of narrative for living subjects. Plot lines

connect the themes, motives and characters that make up a story told

with words and bring about tension-creating changes in them. The

basic constituents of a narrative sequence, that can be thought of as

orientation, chorus, crises, resolution and coda, form a dynamic

rise-and-decline energetic contour. We contend that this energetic

contour is at the heart of nonverbal narrative activity. Although topic

or ‘aboutness’ is a distinctive feature that is supposed to confine narra-

tive to the realm of language, can’t sound and gesture, albeit patterned

in a certain way, also be about something other than themselves?

Music does not tell us anything in particular about events, states of

affairs or other people. Yet most would agree that music is personally

and culturally meaningful — though its meanings are nomadic, shift-

ing and fluid, it has moved people and organised social encounters

throughout the history of humankind (Dissanayake, 2000; Falk, 2000;

Freeman, 2000; Kühl, 2007). At times the sounds of music tell or

recall stories that lie beyond them, and yet all the time their telling is

confined to their own energetic trajectories. Music, at least until

Schönberg, is thought of as being narrative (Imberty, 2005; 2008;

Mâche, 1998), both because it has the power to involve listeners in a

different time and world of meaning and because it can evoke known

situations that sustain an orientation to the future. Music provides a

powerful example of narrative without words, both in terms of form

and in terms of content. Not only is it inherently sequential, it begins,

progresses and ends and its modulations of tension and energy are its

very fabric (Imberty, 1979; 1981), but it can also be related to things

outside itself because it is situated in and itself contains historic

remembered and imagined time.

In song, music is a natural partner for the cadenced language of

poetry, the prosodic expression of emotions in dynamic

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intersubjective synchrony that Ivan Fonagy (2001) calls ‘languages

within language’, the ‘distant past … still present in live speech …

[which] enables the speaker and the poet to express preconscious and

subconscious mental contents that could not be conveyed by means of

the grammar of any language’, employing a ‘proto-grammar’ tran-

scending the differences between particular languages. This is what

the Danish jazz musician and semiotician Ole Kühl (2007) has defined

as ‘musical semantics’. It is the foundation for even the most rational

and apparently unemotional and informative forms of communication

cultivated in technically advanced forms of human cooperative activity

— such as mathematics or philosophical logic.

Jazz musicians describe the feeling of ‘saying something’ with

sound, of telling a story, in the course of improvising together

(Monson, 1996). It is the narrative in music that involves and moves

people, their minds and their bodies, so that their experiences flow in a

common musical time in synchrony with the unfolding energies of the

sound of moving in time. Like verbal stories they carry their audiences

off to other worlds (Bruner, 1990) and into other times. Good narra-

tives are by definition compelling and they are above all about sharing

intention and agency — a narrator feels, as a ‘doer’, impelled to tell a

compelling story. The narration is intended to produce in the audience

a profound concentration of attention. Narrative in this fully alive

sense is a sort of collective journey. It is a way of sharing persuasive

experience in a ‘special’ time, with its own past, present and future,

which is not the mundane time of everyday living.

Narrative tension creates dramatic moments that stand out and that

are memorable as shared emotional experiences. Musical processes

such as changes in dynamics, melody and harmonic progression, tim-

bre or rhythmic structure, underlie subtle shifts in intensity and

involvement in human engagement, even moral commitments. Cli-

mactic moments, based on building intensity through dynamic

shaping of expectation based on familiar states of affairs, are associated

with a discharge of tension and a resulting emotional response (Meyer,

1956). Daniel Stern (2004) describes the occurrence of similar moments

in everyday and psychotherapeutic interactions.

Ingrid Monson (1996) suggests that the development of intensity

(‘intensification’) through a musical performance combines ‘internal’

musical elements that build and release tension with ‘intermusical’

elements that situate the performance within its historical and cultural

contexts, in relation to other musics and their stories. In other words,

narrative involvement is derived from both a general, perhaps intu-

itive, way of structuring and processing experience and from

MUSICAL NARRATIVE AND MOTIVES 127

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apprehending meaningful cultural material. In language-based narra-

tives this cultural level of narrative involvement can be associated

with ‘topic’ or the ‘aboutness’ of stories and clearly if readers or lis-

teners do not share the cultural knowledge of the storyteller they will

not experience the same energetics of narrative. In musical narratives,

‘topic’ is accessed through context-dependent indexical moves. What

gets temporarily fixed as shareable knowledge in musical practice is

derived from real life histories of performance, both personal and

cultural (Gratier, 2008). The events that make up these histories

themselves build narratives so that interactionally produced micro-

narratives are built on historically produced macro-narratives. We

remember our own life’s events by a process that Tulving (2001) has

called auto-noesis, one that, because our memories are created in com-

munication, becomes a collaborative socio-noesis beginning in

infancy (Trevarthen, 2007). It is important to note that between jazz

musicians, musical and verbal discourse together give form to the nar-

rative construction of shared aesthetics (Duranti & Burell, 2004;

Gratier & Stevanovic, 2008).

With these considerations of the pervasive currents of narrative

energy in human affairs, both musical and conversational, what do we

mean when we claim that mother-infant interaction is narrative — a

narrative with ‘communicative musicality’? Clearly mothers and

young infants do not relate events nor do they talk about other peo-

ple’s actions, excepting those times the mother soliloquises as she

addresses her uncomprehending but interested infant. What are the

units or sections that make up a narrative exchange between mother

and infant? And how are they held together? What is the plot? Who

does the telling and who does the listening? Are the roles of teller and

listener well defined or do mothers and babies tell or ‘make up’ stories

together? If mothers use words to speak to their preverbal babies, how

do they tell one another the same stories?

II. Narrative in Live Mother–Infant Interaction:

Involvement in Telling Together in Time

Research on the development of human communication in infancy in

the last 40 years has shown that infants enter the world with powerful

motives for culture that lead them to meaningful involvement with

adults and with the cultures they live in (Trevarthen, 1979; 1980;

1989; 1992; 1998). From birth, infants orient preferentially to the

source of human initiative and responsiveness. They listen with intent

to the affectionately modulated voices of their close kin, recognising

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them as persons and recognising the particular cadences of the lan-

guages they speak based on a history of listening from life in the

womb (De Casper & Fifer, 1980; Lecanuet, 1995; Nazzi et al., 1998).

Neonatal imitation of arbitrary actions such as tongue protrusion

(Metzoff & Moore, 1977; Maratos, 1973; 1982; Kugiumutzakis,

1998) can be considered as a transaction of motives to communicate

‘acts of meaning’ (Halliday, 1975) that indeed gain their meaning in

local contexts precisely by virtue of being shared in little rituals of

exchange (Heimann, 1989; Nagy & Molnar, 2004; Trevarthen,

2001a; 2005). In a sense reciprocal imitation of arbitrary gestures

with a newborn is already a cultural act.

We define interpersonal interaction, not as the alternation of actions

connected through chains of cause and effect, but rather as common

action, as a coordination and joining of purposeful communicative

expression. Vocal interactions that define a ‘protoconversational

phase’ in infant development, starting around 6 to 8 weeks after birth

and lasting at least a couple of months, are characterised by turn-

taking antiphonic interchange as well as choral overlap (Stern et al.,

1975); though the ratio of single turn vocalisation to choral vocalisa-

tion has been found to be culture specific, reflecting the norms of ver-

bal conversation (Gratier, 2001; 2003). Interpersonal interaction

intuitively creates contexts for affective involvement with others,

bringing into play socio-culturally situated and embodied practices

(Sterponi, 2004).

It is well established that adults, all over the world, spontaneously

modify the cadence, pitch and intonation of their speech when

adressing infants (Fernald & Simon, 1984; Papoušek et al., 1985;

Stern et al., 1982). Their speech contains longer pauses, shorter utter-

ances, more repetition, greater modulation and width of pitch range

and enhanced articulation (Panneton et al., 2006). The unique musi-

cality of ‘motherese’ or ‘infant-directed speech’ (IDS) dynamically

guides the infant to intersubjective engagement, involving whole

body synchronisation (Condon & Sander, 1974). By the second month

after birth, infants respond with eloquent vocal sounds and expres-

sions of interest and joy, and it is clear that they themselves are moti-

vated to make a contribution. Adults in turn start to listen attentively

to what young infants have to say, taking them seriously. They formu-

late questions to which they expect answers, they tell them about the

people and events that surround them. They vary the prosody of their

speech according to the infant’s mood, intent and attention

(Pomerleau et al., 1993; Stern et al., 1982). Adults’ speech, therefore,

MUSICAL NARRATIVE AND MOTIVES 129

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becomes expectant, feeling it must afford and acknowledge infant

participation.

The dialogue between infant and parent undergoes developmental

changes motivated by the changing motives and expectations of the

child, related to important growth of bodily and psychological powers

(Trevarthen and Aitken, 2003). A few studies have highlighted a

marked change in the quality of IDS after the sixth month. It appears

that ‘affective’ or melodic/poetic speech is gradually replaced by

more ‘informative’ speech (Bornstein et al., 1992), that topics shift

from talking about the infant’s internal states to events in the external

world (Snow, 1977), that the forms and functions of questions change.

These differences in the quality of IDS mark a transition from primary

to secondary intersubjectivity, from interpersonal involvement to

triadic person-person-object cooperative engagement (Trevarthen

and Hubley, 1978; Hubley and Trevarthen, 1979; Trevarthen and

Marwick, 1986; Trevarthen, 1993). We suggest that parents’ speech is

compelling for infants because it is organised in narrative time and

that infants are called to participate, as they ‘wish to do’, in the mutual

‘telling’ of the story of their special connectedness to each other in a

common meaning filled world. Infant directed speech is musical and

narrative, it is musically narrative, and so are the contributions of the

infant.

An important body of research has shown in the last 20 years that

infants have a great sensitivity to the subtle dimensions of expressive

musical sound, to melody and rhythm, timbre and consonnance

(Demany et al., 1977; Schellenberg & Trehub, 1996; Thorpe &

Trehub, 1989; Trehub et al., 1984; Trehub & Thorpe, 1989). The

mother’s voice, whether speaking or singing, is a musical instrument

whose emotional and aesthetic impact is already felt by the foetus.

And mothers around the world become passionate singers for their

babies, to amuse them or to make them sleep (Trehub et al., 1997;

Trevarthen, 1999; 2002). The musical structures of infant songs pres-

ent great similarities around the word (Unyk et al., 1992), they change

according to the ages of the infants they are made for and according to

the activity they are meant to inspire. We know that adults sing in

special ways for infants because they adjust the canonical frame of a

traditional song to fit with infants’ moods and interests (Trehub &

Trainor, 1998). The narrative structure of each verse of the song,

which has a given beginning, climax or crisis and end, gains a musical

narrativity through repetitive live co-performance with an infant, it

acquires the lines of dramatic tension and vital pulse that fire the

infant’s curiosity and imagination.

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The temporal organisation and quality of vocalisation in mother–

infant interaction has been described as a ‘communicative musicality’

based on the three coordinated dimensions of ‘pulse’, ‘quality’ and

‘narrative’ (Malloch, 1999; Malloch & Trevarthen, in press;

Trevarthen, 1999). An intrinsic timing or pulse of expression, which

is thought to stem from coupled oscillators of neurobiological

‘clocks’, innate in the human mind (Jones, 1976; Pöppel, 1997;

Osborne, in press), drives the emotional energy of the moving subject.

The dynamic quality of each component movement, its force, coher-

ence, economy, modulation and harmony, signals and shapes the sub-

ject’s intent in getting across to the other. Finally the progress of

movements over longer stretches of time, their grouping into phrases

and longer episodes, defines a narrative (Malloch, 1999). There

appears to be a deep autonomic cycle governing our physiology,

creating fluctuations of vitality that rounds out the shareable drama of

each narrative episode lasting tens of seconds (Trevarthen, 2008).

Narrative in this sense is seen as the energetic regulation of expres-

sion that holds and directs the whole ecology of interaction based on

rhythmic engagement between mother and infant. The musicality of

an adult’s spontaneous speech and song, including body mouvements,

gestures and facial expressions, moves infants to rhythmic involve-

ment (Mazokopaki and Kugiumutzakis, in press). And the effect of

being swept up by sound in rhythm is also emotional. Daniel Stern

(1999) suggests that the subject or substance of mother–infant interac-

tion is provided by ‘vitality contours’, that is emotional ‘feeling

forms’ that map onto prosodic contours in the voice, gestural phrases

and, more generally, supramodal units of expression that are tempo-

rally shaped. He also describes these dynamic ‘vitality contours’ as

‘proto-narrative envelopes’ (Stern, 1998) because they are presented

as fluctuations of intensity that begin and end and that draw ‘lines of

dramatic tension’. What Stern describes is a kind of phrasing that is

itself narrative and that builds longer narrative sequences. This phras-

ing is marked by various indices, some which are hard to quantify,

such as sudden acceleration, pitch and intensity climaxes, final

lengthening and, of course, silences or pauses (Delavenne et al., 2008;

Gratier, 2001; 2003; Malloch, 1999). Silences give shape to the sound

of heard movement just as pauses give shape to seen movement by

imprinting rhythms of alternation. And silences between sounds, in

spoken language, in music and perhaps also in mother–infant vocal

interaction, also represent what is not said but can be sensed or

potentially anticipated.

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In an interactive situation, where the flux of organised sound is

jointly produced, it is evident that participants come to be interdepen-

dently rhythmically attuned, in flow together. Thus, infants might lock

into the rhythm of motherese (IDS) by focussing their attention on

salient features in the stream of audible and visible expression, and

infant participation is, we find, more likely to occur at rhythmically

relevant points. Coordinated action-attention rhythms based on coor-

dinated expression in mother–infant interaction might provide a com-

mon time dimension that supports experiences of togetherness and

affective involvement, or what Schütz has called ‘the reciprocal shar-

ing of the Other’s flux of experiences in inner time’ (Schütz,

1951/1977, p. 118). Rhythm and narrative are intimately connected in

both music and in mother–infant interaction, as suggested by Malloch

and Trevarthen’s ‘Theory of Communicative Musicality’.

Conversational narratives are characterised by repeated phrases

(Labov, 1972), powerful scenic images and ellipsis that call on speak-

ers and listeners to actively co-construct the story as it unfolds

(Tannen, 1989). Rhythm and poetics play an important part in spoken

interaction through the use of alliteration, carefully coordinated sound

and energy (Tannen, 1989). Coordinated rhythms and harmonies of

the voice and body hold speakers together in mutual attention. In fact

the sociolinguist Ron Scollon (1982) likens verbal conversation to

musical ensemble when he writes (p. 342–43) ‘Ensemble in music

refers to the extent to which the performers have achieved one mind,

or … one body, in the performance of their work. Of the elements

which contribute to the achievement of ensemble, tempo is the guid-

ing element.’ Shared rhythm, capturing the essential pulse that gov-

erns all animal movement, making the future of action predictable, is

perhaps the most fundamental distributed structure for human

communication.

Mari Riess Jones’ ‘Dynamic Attending Theory’ (Jones, 1976; Jones

& Boltz, 1989) provides a plausible explanatory model for this con-

nection between rhythm and narrative in intersubjective experience.

Jones defines attending as a dynamic temporal process that is adjusted

to the temporalities of perceptual phenomena. Her basic thesis is that

the focus of attention is rhythmical and that it initially entrains to a

particular level of periodicity in the perceived world based on the

recurrence of salient events or moments. Subjects become ‘rhythmi-

cally attuned’ to external phenomena. Rhythmic attunement at a ‘ref-

erent’ level enables the subject to shift the focus of attention to other

rhythmic levels that may be hierarchically superior or inferior. Jones

suggests that rhythmic attunement depends on the existence of

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internal biologically based oscillators. In a sense dynamic attending

explains why we feel we are moved into shared time when listening to

streams of humanly produced sound like speech or music. There is a

‘quasi-simultaneity’ (Schütz, 1951) between the subject’s stream of

consciousness and the temporal object’s dynamic structure so that the

boundary between subject and object recedes and gives way to an

experience of ‘now’. In this way, the perceiver becomes an intently

involved co-performer.

We suggest that coordinated interaction leads mothers and infants

to imagined worlds through shared time that are not only narrative in

structure but also convey narrative content based on a history of

meaningful communication that holds sedimented motifs and rou-

tines, stimulating anticipatory action and contributing to making the

intersubjective experience an emotional experience of belonging. We

turn to this issue in the next section.

III. Narratives of Belonging:

Proto-Habitus as Living Memory-In-Action

We can now define nonverbal interactive narrative along four inter-

connected axes: first, it can be seen as the embodied enactment of

communicative intent; second, it is delineated by a particular sequenc-

ing of framed episodes tied together in energetic contours involving a

‘crisis’ and a ‘resolution’; third, it requires the rhythmic and affective

involvement of co-participants and, finally, it brings about meaningful

intersubjective experiences that ‘thicken’ relationships of togetherness.

We would like to discuss the idea that the temporal framing of moments

and episodes in emotionally shared narrative sequences founds cultural

experience. However, we do not provide any empirical evidence for this

claim in the present paper.

The temporal sequencing that defines narrative fulfils another

important function for both verbal and nonverbal sense making: it

frames experience by segmenting its flow into memorable events.

New events, happening ‘now’, must be embedded in narrative frames

in order to be remembered (Mandler, 1984). There they gain status by

virtue of being connected to other events within known situations.

Human minds are built on memories that grow from the present in

widening circles of involvement with both private and shared con-

sciousness, tracing lines of meaning beyond known places and times

until belief and expectation of events that can occur ‘somewhere

sometime’ transforms experience, assisted by language (Donaldson,

1992). We reconstruct the past to make sense of the present. This is

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perhaps the basis of our feeling of continuity, of existence. ‘Framing

pursues experience into memories’ (Bruner, 1990, p. 56).

We have described how, on one level, mothers and infants commu-

nicate within common time frames, in periods of the near present that

are made special through processes of slowing and speeding up, quali-

ties of silence and salient moments that stand out in time. Vitality con-

tours are involved in the temporal framing of communicative

experience. On another level, narratives of sound and gesture in

mother–infant interaction frame and ‘make special’ present experi-

ences to give them a past existence, making sure they will keep alive

in memory. Narrative activity supports multiple temporalities like

strands that cross and intertwine or separate and vanish. Written and

conversational narratives are full of ‘stories within stories’. Ricoeur

pointed out that narrative time has a different quality to ‘real’ time, it

passes at different speeds and it does not drag us inexorably from end

to end. According to Ricoeur (1983) narrative founds the experience

of time itself. It is the present perspective of storytelling, the shared

experience of a ‘here and now’ that enables people to escape mentally

to imagined places in imagined time. And, as Adam Smith

(1777/1982) famously said, narrative articulates memory and imagi-

nation, and he was writing about music as one of the ‘imitative arts’.

Imagined worlds are built out of familiar worlds whose contours can

be anticipated and recalled.

By creating ‘special time’ with its own internal coherence, narra-

tives without words open up horizons of possibility that support the

projections into the future of developing identities based on histories

of everyday encounters. However, the special time of a story

depends on its moving towards an anticipated end. Ending, in fact,

drives the whole narrative process (Ricoeur, 1983). A story becomes

a whole, exists as a separate unity, only once it has ended. Like a

bubble that forms and lifts into the air, the encapsulated temporality

of a story becomes detached from mundane time of continuous expe-

rience (with no end) only once it has ended. Its ontological status

changes once it has achieved its goal and so the imaginative drive of

narrative is also a drive to make memory, to accumulate and organise

past experience in what Margaret Donaldson (1992) calls ‘transcen-

dent consciousness’. Narrative creates memory but it also draws past

experience into the present. It provides memorable information on

which future collaborations and relationships may be built.

The sort of framing and parsing of intention that is provided by nar-

rative organisation in mother–infant interaction, we contend, supports

a developing ‘synbiographical’ self whose identity and memories are

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formed in processes of shared and mutual engagement. The young

infant’s ability to remember dynamic ‘musical’ events that involve

motivated action over relatively long periods of time has gained wide

support from experimental research (Courage & Cowan, 2008; Hane

& Rovee-Collier, 1995). Early musicality marks with emotional sig-

natures the identity of persons and ritual events (Trevarthen , 2002).

Everyday social interactions are driven by a desire to perform the

signs of a cultural ‘belonging’. The perfecting of intrinsic skills for

musicality is a way of declaring allegiance and affiliation. A new-

born knows the mother by the tone and inflections of her voice. A

six-month-old who smiles at the recognition of a favourite song or

playful routine displays an awareness of a collective level of know-

ing, of what we call a ‘proto-habitus’ (Gratier, 2007; Gratier &

Apter-Danon, in press).

In order to be shareable, to produce a shared dramatic tension, a

narrative must include the reiteration of known forms. These in turn

can accommodate new and unexpected events. Culture is based on

agreed ‘norms’ that connect people through the excitement of shared

anticipation, but it also needs interpretive procedures for making

sense of departures from what is commonly expected. ‘The function

of the story is to find an intentional state that mitigates or at least

makes comprehensible a deviation from a canonical cultural pattern’

(Bruner, 1990, pp. 49–50) (cf. Apter, this volume). Young infants and

their partners learn to ‘mess around’ with expectations together and

this ability attests to the subtle and direct perception infants have of

other people’s intentions (Reddy, 2008). We do not need a ‘Theory of

Mind’ to be aware of intentions, specially when they are woven into

the socio-cultural fabric of meaningful and playful exchange (Zlatev

et al., 2008).

It is the back and forth relating between the past within the present

and its possible futures in the course of social engagement with know-

ing partners that establishes a common ground for cultural experience.

Just as verbal narratives relate ‘now’ past events or happenings, non-

verbal narratives bring the past into the present by recalling known

forms, figures or patterns that must unfold in shared present experi-

ence. Narrative emerges from the past with a drive toward a future

ending, and thus shapes present experience; perhaps it makes time, as

Ricoeur (1983) has suggested. The musical narratives we describe in

interactions between mothers and infants are not just ways of organis-

ing expression - into sequences that draw lines of tension - that sup-

port communication. They have a form of ‘aboutness’ because they

also have content. ‘Phrases’ (Gratier, 2003; Delavenne et al., 2008)

MUSICAL NARRATIVE AND MOTIVES 135

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‘vitality contours’or ‘protonarrative envelopes’perhaps constitute the

events that build narrative. As Stern writes, ‘the protonarrative enve-

lope is [...] a time envelope as well as an event envelope’ (Stern, 1995,

p. 91).

In the preceding section we described the way in which rhythmic

involvement was a crucial dimension of narrative but involvement

with talk, text, mouvement and image, which Deborah Tannen (1989)

considers to be the driving force of narrative, is also based on ‘pat-

terns of sense’. If sound patterns are the basis for rhythmic and musi-

cal involvement, sense patterns create involvement through

participation in processes of sense-making. The two together, accord-

ing to Tannen, create emotional involvement. Narrative involvement

between mothers and infants, we contend, is based on intuitive rhyth-

mic musical forms of engagement as well as on cultural meaningful

contents of engagement.

Mothers and their preverbal infants rapidly build rapport, a sense of

intimate connectedness and of ‘knowing’ each other. Language is

clearly quite superfluous to this building of rapport and intimacy. In

fact, even between people who can talk to each other, rapport is per-

haps most fundamentally based on nonverbal or ‘unverbaliseable’

communication (cf. Weisbuch & Ambady, this volume). A sense of

rapport often comes from being ‘understood’ without explicitly say-

ing what one means. Tacit understanding between people is related to

their sharing cultural knowledge and habits of practice (Condon,

1982; Gumperz, 1982) and it calls forth mutual participation in sense

making (Tannen, 1989). What mother and infant share in communica-

tion is unsayable, yet in the course of their everyday interactions they

are narrating their rapport, their connectedness and togetherness in

time; in short, their mutual sense of ‘belonging’.

We propose that in the first six months of an infant’s life a

‘proto-habitus’, which is both derived from and precedes what

Bourdieu (1972; 1990) has called ‘habitus’, plays a crucial role in

holding together narratives of involvement with close partners. We

focus here only on certain features of ‘habitus’ as it is defined and ana-

lysed by Pierre Bourdieu (1972; 1990). Habitus comprises organised

sets of dispositions that generate and regulate social practice. These

dispositions that regulate or ‘spontaneously and collectively

ochestrate’ social life are historically rooted and they also in turn

actively produce and shape newer dispositions. (It is important to note

that Bourdieu rejects structuralist positions when he describes habitus

as ‘structuring structured structures’.) A central feature of ‘habitus’ is

that it is body-based, it is considered as a ‘second nature’ or embodied

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social learning — a history that is forgotten and transformed into

natural state. Habitus can be seen, for our purposes, as a nonverbally

grounded embodied cultural knowing that is expressed in practice by

people connected through time within real life communities.

While habitus concerns communities of people living together and

exists both collectively and individually, proto-habitus concerns

micro-cultural units made of a few specific partners. It is only indi-

rectly related to the community of like-minded — and like-bodied —

others that surrounds the intimate circle of interaction through the

‘habitus’ of parents and close kin. For example, the particular

cadences of mother’s speech that the infant becomes familiar with

starting in utero are the result of the mother’s social practice of

speaking a certain language in a certain way. Proto-habitus exists only in

interactive practice and in the intersubjective time of musical narrative

involvement that frames the interactional exchanges themselves.

Proto-habitus represents the locally meaningful and situationally

specific particulars of the developing relationships the infant enter-

tains. Later, during more cooperative games in secondary intersubjec-

tivity (Trevarthen and Hubley, 1978; Hubley and Trevarthen, 1979),

infants acquire the so-called socio-intentional abilities such as ‘joint

attention’ and ‘pointing’ that very clearly pave the road to language —

because they mark or draw attention to critical moments and events in

a shared narration — and that therefore have been considered to be the

building blocks of a revolutionary ‘cultural learning’ (Tomasello et

al., 1993).

Before they are interested, or have the ‘confidence’, to really coop-

erate in some task intended by another, infants ‘discover’ with great

excitement and pride that some of the particulars that formed the

‘proto-habitus’ of their intimate relationships can in fact be shared

with members of their community at large and attract their pleasure

and admiration. Thus from around 6 months parents play and sing

more vigorously the canonical songs, rhymes and games they have

learned from their own parents (Eckerdal & Merker, in press), and

infants learn these ‘rituals’ eagerly, becoming proud of their ‘identity’

as performers (Trevarthen, 2002). But the ‘grounding signs of culture’

(Cowley et al., 2004) based on a semiosis of organised embodied

‘feeling forms’ (Trevarthen, 1987; 1992; 1994) are, we believe, to be

found in the earliest interactions of coordinated motive states between

mother and baby.

Finally, we wish the make clear an important connection between

proto-habitus, emotion and culture by suggesting that the recognition

and physical anticipation of the projected styles and routines the

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infant has come to know induce strong emotions of belonging, pride

and confidence. Proto-habitus may also provide an ‘interpretive con-

text’ for mother–infant narratives within the framework of a ‘shared

micro-culture’. Events in verbal stories gain meaning by being

embedded in ‘interpretive contexts’ based on past experience so that

in a bakhtinian sense every story is linked to all the other stories

(Bakhtin, 1986). Bruner (1990), too, is committed to the idea that nar-

ratives derive meaning from being embedded in cultures of shared

representation and expectation. And that by virtue of this, narratives

also make culture and identity. Most narratives are about life experi-

ence and how people relate to each other, purposefully and with feel-

ing. We suggest that the first narratives, the nonverbal musical stories

mothers and babies spin together, are about finding oneself in the

other, about the special ways in which understanding the other means

losing oneself or about the reciprocal attribution of intentionality and

agency (Bruner & Feldman, 1993). Katherine Nelson’s (1989)

famous work on the bed-time narrative accounts that toddlers make to

themselves about the day’s events sheds light on the importance of life

experience for shaping narrative. Narratives of self can also be based

on telling stories without words, which, according to Damasio (1999),

involves the coordination of nonverbal images produced by the brain.

Sacks (2007) would identify this process of creating meaning in the

brain with music itself.

Mother–infant interaction is narrative in form and content and this

makes it meaningful. And we accept, with Mark Johnson (2007,

p. 260), that ‘the mechanisms of human meaning extend far beyond

the capacity for language’. The ‘felt immediacy’ (Bråten, 1998) of the

musical phrases of a mother’s Infant Directed Speech draws the infant

into a fictionalized space where known shapes of time are recounted

and conjure up emotions of belonging. Meaning grows out of the

experienced flow of shared embodied narratives.

IV. Ways of Telling: How a Mother and Infant

Orchestrate a ‘Dénouement’ In Vocal Exchange

We now present some examples of narrative organisation in

mother–infant vocal interaction. The analyses that follow are based on

a corpus of video and audio recordings of mothers and two- to

three-month-old infants interacting in their home environments.

Mothers were asked to communicate with their babies the way they

normally do using the disposition they find most comfortable. Moth-

ers were also encouraged to sing rhymes, action songs or lullabies.

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Spectrograms, pitch plots and intensity curves were obtained for the

sequences analyzed using the acoustic analysis software Praat, ver-

sion 4.4.17 (Boersma & Weeninck, 2002). Spectrograms provide real

time information about fundamental frequency, amplitude and har-

monics in the form of frequency bands (formants) corresponding to a

resonnance in the vocal tract. The darker formant bands have higher

energy. A ‘pitch plot’ derived from the fundamental frequency (mea-

sured in Hertz) represents the perceived ‘height’ of sound contoured

over time, i.e., it gives us a reading of the variation of melody in real

time. Intensity curves plot changes in amplitude (measured in deci-

bels) over time. The plots are presented with annotations that illustrate

the analysis techniques we use to study mother–infant vocal

interaction.

The first example (Figure 1) reveals the rhythmic pulse in a short

segment of interaction between a Parisian mother and her

MUSICAL NARRATIVE AND MOTIVES 139

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2-month-old son. It shows how the mother establishes a regular pulse,

through the timing of her utterances, and how it supports a rhythmic

involvement between her and her baby. Mother and infant appear to be

‘together in time’ or, as jazz musicians say, sharing ‘good time’

(Monson, 1996). A large-scale study of the vocal interaction between

60 mothers and their young infants has shown that pulse is generally

flexible, with a periodicity around 900 milliseconds on average with a

standard deviation of 150 milliseconds (Gratier, 2001; 2003). This

corresponds with the lower portion of the range of a metronome —

from andante to adagio. Interacting partners come in around the beat,

sometimes just before and sometimes just after. We have called this

the ‘expressive timing’ of mother–infant interaction (Gratier, 2003).

Fluctuations of pulse probably play a key role in maintaining involve-

ment through stimulating variations of anticipatory attention. The

pulse durations for the example shown in Figure 1. are variable and

we may note what looks like ‘phrase final lengthening’ in the 5th and

the 11th pulses.

140 M. GRATIER AND C. TREVARTHEN

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The second example (Figure 2) shows a 43 second narrative epi-

sode of lively vocal interaction between the same Parisian mother and

her 2-month-old son. The sequences of the narrative episode have

been highlighted on a pitch plot showing that mother and infant

explore pitch space around a baseline middle C. A more detailed view

is given of what we call the narrative ‘crisis’. An intensity curve

shows the general trajectory of energy or intensity over time, culmi-

nating at the point of crisis and gradually returning to its initial level.

Table 1 provides a more detailed analysis of the phrases that make up

the narrative sequences visible on the pitch plots in Figure 2. Note that

the verbalizations of the mother in this example suggest that she

thinks of her infant as capable of ‘telling her about something’. And

she seems to find it interesting. Phrases are defined as bouts of vocal-

ization followed by a pause. In this example, phrases last between

1200 and 5300 milliseconds. Again, this example corroborates our

findings based on larger samples of recorded interactions (Delavenne

et al., 2008; Gratier, 2001; 2003). It is interesting to note that the

phrases that end the sequences making up the narrative episode are

generally longer than the others — except for the ‘crisis’ phrase which

is the second longest in the entire episode.

Table 1 [inf. voc. = infant vocalization]

Phrase Transcription Sequence Length of

utterance + pause

1 Est-ce que t’as envie de parler

à maman?

Do you want to speak with

mummy ?

Orientation 1900 ms

2 Hein Rïann

Huh Raïnn

Orientation 1800 ms

3 Qu’est ce tu racontes?

What do you have to tell ?

Orientation 1200 ms

4 Qu’est ce tu racontes à

maman? [inf. voc.] oh ben oui

[inf. voc.] oh

What do you have to tell

mummy? [inf. voc.] oh well

yes [inf. voc.] oh

Orientation 5300 ms

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Phrase Transcription Sequence Length of

utterance + pause

5 Tout ça tu racontes? [inf. voc.]

You have all of that to tell ?

[inf. voc.]

Chorus 1 1700 ms

6 Ah oui [overlapping inf. voc.]

oh oui [inf. voc.]

Ah yes [overlapping inf. voc.]

oh yes [inf. voc.]

Chorus 1 2600 ms

7 [inf. voc.] oh ben oui t’avais

envie de parler ce matin

[inf. voc.] oh well yes you

wanted to talk this morning

Chorus 1 2800 ms

8 [inf. vocs] oh [inf. voc.] Chorus 1 3500 ms

9 Oh ben dis donc [inf. voc.]

Oh is that so [inf. voc.]

Chorus 2 3100 ms

10 [inf. voc.] oh [inf. voc.]

[overlapping vocs] oh là c’est

fort!

[inf. voc.] of [inf. voc.]

[overlapping vocs] Wow that’s

powerful/that’s great!

Chorus 2

CRISIS

4900 ms

11 Ah [inf. voc.] ah oui

[overlapping inf. voc.]

Ah [inf. voc.] ah yes

[overlapping inf. voc.]

Chorus 2

RESOLUTION

2400 ms

12 Eh oui [inf. voc.]

Well yes [inf. voc.]

Chorus 2

RESOLUTION

3500 ms

13 Oh ben dis donc

Oh well really

Coda 1300 ms

14 C’est parce que t’avais bien

dormi que tu voulais me

raconter [overlapping inf.

voc.]?

It’s because you slept well that

you wanted to tell me

[overlapping inf. voc.] ?

Coda 2200 ms

15 Oh Coda 1500 ms

16 Ben dis donc (stretched)

Well really (stretched)

Coda 3200 ms

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There is today growing evidence that the ways in which young infants

and mothers engage with each other, their forms of interacting, are, or

become, to some extent, culture-specific (Cowley et al., 2004;

Gratier, 2001; 2003; Keller, 2003; Stork, 1986; Trevarthen, 1988). If

proto-habitus provides a developing repertoire of embodied habits,

motifs, and recursive formula, rooted in the cultural styles a mother

brings with her from her own community, how does it influence the

narrative musicality of mother–infant interaction? Can proto-habitus

be described and analysed in the visible traces of the on-going

intersubjective encounters that ‘thicken’ relationships?

Comparative research has highlighted unique features of mother–

infant interaction in diverse communities and has questioned some of

the assumptions underlying research on early interaction carried out

in European and North American contexts. In many parts of the world

face-to-face interaction is much less frequent or even absent, at least

in contexts observed by researchers. Communication may take place

predominantly through tactile and kinesic modes rather than through

visual, vocal and gestural ones and mothers are not necessarily

infants’ primary interactive partners (Field et al., 1981; Hewlett et al.,

1998; Konner, 1976; LeVine and LeVine, 1966; Levine et al., 1994;

Stork, 1986; Trevarthen, 1988; Tronick et al., 1989). Despite the

attention drawn to important differences in the overall interactive

style of mothers and infants around the world, communicative

exchange based on coordinated timing appears to be pervasive, and to

follow intuitively known principles.

Differences in interaction style have been found in a comparative

study of face-to-face interaction between mothers and very young

infants in Scotland and Nigeria, where Nigerian mothers were found

to be more coercive, directive, boisterous and physical with their

infants whereas Scottish mothers were more inclined to let their

infants express themselves spontaneously, used more talk and less

touching (Trevarthen, 1988). A similar study of interaction style dif-

ferences between Indian, French and North American mothers’ vocal

interactions with 2- to 5-month olds showed that the turn-taking

patterns were most different for Indian dyads as compared with

French and North American dyads (Gratier, 1999; 2001; 2003).

More specifically Indian mothers and infants vocalised together

(rather than in clear alternation) more than the other two groups,

and the pauses between their turns were shorter than those in the

two other groups. Indian mothers also verbalized less, producing

more modulated vocal sounds. In a study of mother–infant interac-

t ion at 14 weeks in South-Afr ica (among isiZulu and

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English-speaking dyads), Cowley et al. (2004) go so far as to

describe a precocious body-based semiotic activity based on iconic

signs acquiring indexical functions in the course of on-going interac-

tion. A controlled comparison of mother– infant interaction among

older infants in Guatemala and the US examining the ways in which

mothers and babies organize their behaviour during the joint explora-

tion of a novel object showed that while North American mothers used

talk in their interactions, Guatemalan mothers relied more on non-ver-

bal communication (Rogoff & Mosier, 1993).

There can be conspicuous differences of timing and expression in

the ways mothers in different cultures share emotions and vitality in

their dialogues. For example, Powers has found that vowels in the

speech of Japanese mothers to their four-month-olds has a wider

range of durations and pitch levels than the speech of Scottish mothers

to their young infants, and the infants vocalised differently too, like

their mothers. The differences might be related to the contrasting

moral attitudes or beliefs, and the differences in speech prosody, in

these two cultures. They appear to be influenced by the importance

given in traditional Japanese society to respect for the emotions of

other persons, and to concepts of how infants feel and how they

should be addressed (Powers and Trevarthen, in press).

These types of large-scale cross-cultural studies address the issue

of the progressive developement of shared cultural styles in interac-

tion. How does a very young infant come to anticipate the particular

prosodic signature in the mother’s speech that signals the end of a nar-

rative episode or a new beginning? We need to trace the trajectories of

these local habits of communication that foster intimacy, rapport and

shared understanding. How does an infant learn to recognise patterns of

prosody, dynamics and rhythm, and more importantly, how does the infant

indicate (iconically and indexically) his or her recognition of them?

We believe the kind of rhythmic involvement and narrative musi-

cality, made visible in our acoustic analysis mother–infant vocal inter-

action, inevitably generate cultural grooves, akin to the licks, riffs and

gimmicks that improvising musicians call on in their ‘musical conver-

sations’ (Gratier, 2008) and that these in turn support the emotions of

belonging that enable mothers and babies to be in synch and to share

in imagined times and spaces.

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V. Story-telling and Story-Listening in Action-Songs and

Musical Games

The building up of local histories of relating between mothers and

infants — as well as fathers and other family members — are also sup-

ported by the rich musical cultures of baby songs that infants inspire

their parents to reproduce. Parents often feel compelled to sing for

their infants (Trehub & Trainor, 1998) regardless of whether they

think they can sing or not. And most of the time the songs they sing

and the games they play are taken from the ancient histories of their

own cultural traditions (Custodero and Johnson-Green, 2003; Merker,

2005), drawing on personal memory, the recollections of grandpar-

ents, or on examples from books or the internet. North-American

parents sing to their babies several times a day, in playful interaction

and during daily activities such as bathing, feeding and putting to

sleep (Trehub et al., 1997).

This musical inheritance is well adapted to the needs and appetites

of infants. Infants appear to prefer infant-directed song to

infant-directed speech (Trehub & Nataka, 2002). Baby songs,

action-games and lullabies around the world share remarkable rhyth-

mic and structural similarities (Trevarthen, 2002; Unyk et al., 1992).

They present simple melodic contours, repeated motifs and a rela-

tively narrow pitch range (Trehub & Trainor, 1998). Baby songs and

even spontaneous nonsense chants are typically composed of groups

of verses or stanzas each lasting between 15 and 30 seconds. They are

inherently narrative in their form, comprising sequences that regulate

the progression of energy towards a joyful climax and down again

(Trevarthen, 1999). Lines in the verses of most baby songs last around

3 seconds on average. This is also the mean duration of a ‘phrase’ in

spontaneous interaction which has been shown to correspond to the

average length of musical phrases, lines of poetry and conversational

stretches of talk and to the subjective experience of a ‘present moment’

(Fraisse, 1978; Gratier, 2001; Trevarthen, 1999). And adults’ singing

style when they sing for infants, regardless of the genre of the song

itself, is characterized by slower tempo, higher pitch and marked inten-

sification (Trainor, 1996; Trehub et al., 1997). In our corpus of recordings

we have many examples of mothers singing energetic popular tunes to

their infants that they have tailored to their infants’ needs so that their

musical features resemble those of traditional baby songs.

Mothers often make rhythmic displays of hand movements while

they sing to the baby. Infants soon partake in these multi-modal musi-

cal activities with rhythmic bouncing of their own body, movements

MUSICAL NARRATIVE AND MOTIVES 145

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of the arms and hands and a variety of well-timed vocal productions

(Mazakopaki and Kugiumutzakis, in press). In these situations the

infant can be considered as an, albeit novice, co-performer rather than

as an audience (Eckerdal & Merker, in press). In the case of

action-songs and musical rhymes, parents do not so much sing for the

infant as they sing with the infant and the singing styles they adopt are

geared towards infant participation. In this sense the infant’s status as

co-performer does not depend on any actual, physical contribution to

the song. The ritualised performances infants and their loved ones

regularly partake in must contribute to shaping the narrative mind

with a culturally grounded sense of self (Trevarthen, 2002).

An example of a 3-month-old infant participating in the musical

narrative of a well known traditional French baby song sung by his

mother is presented in Figures 3 and 4. ‘Les marionnettes’ is organised

in multiple repeating 4 line stanzas where rhythmically rotating hand

gestures accompany the musical pulse. We have analysed a stretch of

mother–infant engagment in which the mother repeats the same two

stanzas of ‘Les Marionnettes’ twice with a short segment of talk

between them. The entire sequence in presented as a pitch plot at the

top of both figures. Spectrograms, pitch plots and intensity curves are

presented for each of the two-stanza songs. The lines and stanzas and

their durations in each version of the song are presented in table 2. The

lines range from 2400 to 3850 miliseconds, a range that matches natu-

ral phrase length in mother–infant vocal interaction. The first set of

two stanzas lasts 22.2 seconds and the second set lasts 23.65 seconds

suggesting there is a slowing down at the end of the cycle. The infant

intervenes vocally in each of the 4 stanzas, towards the beginning of

each stanza in the first version and towards the end of each stanza in

the second version, each time at a musically salient moment

corresponding to a phrase boundary. And in both versions the

infant’s involvement around the mid-point of the song sequence

brings about an intensity peak that can be considered as the focal

point of a narrative episode.

The little boy in our example is already well versed. He knows what

to expect when his mother sings this particular song and he knows

what she expects of him. This experience of singing a well-known

song together is constitutive of the infant’s proto-habitus. And

because the mother is connected through this song and others, through

her ways of talking and moving, to the cultural habitus of her commu-

nity (or communities — for infants can handle plurality), the infant

will come to anticipate and participate in interactions with a wider and

146 M. GRATIER AND C. TREVARTHEN

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MUSICAL NARRATIVE AND MOTIVES 147

Figure 3

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148 M. GRATIER AND C. TREVARTHEN

Figure 4

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wider array of partners who share the same tacit, embodied, much

larger and much older culture.

Table 2 [* = Infant vocalises]

Stanza 1 Line length

Song 1

Line length

Song 2

1 Ainsi font font font

That’s how they go, go, go

2500 ms 2600 ms

2 Les petites marionnettes

The little puppets

2500 ms* 2600 ms

3 Ainsi font font font

That’s how they go, go, go

2500 ms 2600 ms

4 Trois p’tits tours et puis s’en vont

Three little twirls and then they’re

gone

3000 ms 3850 ms*

Stanza 2

1 Mais elles reviendront

But they will come back

2800 ms* 2900 ms

2 Les petites marionnettes

The little puppets

2400 ms 2600 ms

3 Mais elles reviendront

But they will come back

2900 ms 2800 ms

4 Quand les enfants dormiront

When the children are asleep

3600 ms 3700 ms*

Conclusion: On the Human Readiness for Narratives of

Relating, and for Making Culture Meaningful

By carefully watching and analysing the intimate encounters of moth-

ers and infants, and remembering the ability of young children to find

companionship before they speak in play and at work with an increas-

ing circle of companions, we have learned to accept a paradox. It

appears that the need to tell and accept the story of culture, the history

of meanings we must learn, is innate. Educational reformers, like the

17th-century teacher Comenius (2003), are right — one has to accept

MUSICAL NARRATIVE AND MOTIVES 149

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the child as a ‘reasonable person’, willing to be a partner in the making

and remembering of meaning. Babies are born to find meaning in

intent participation with the imaginings and ambitions of older minds.

They have a musical sense of time, and a language of emotions that

matches that of the wisest adult, including sensitive feelings about the

contingent appropriateness of other persons’ behaviours. And they

soon build a ‘personal narrative history’ that connects moments of the

present to an imagined future as well as a remembered past.

With this new idea of the human mind as motivated for the ‘poetry’

or creative stories of culture (Trevarthen, 2004a), we see evidence that

preparations are made for an intermental life in prenatal growth of

organs for regulating agency and experience, and for making the regu-

lations public or intersubjective. A human foetus, months before birth,

has a body, sensory and motor organs, and a brain already adapted in

intricate ways to share acting and experiencing — with hearing for the

rhythms and tones of human voice, with eyes that signal looking for

others to see, with more muscles than any other creature for expres-

sions of the face that tell of appetites and aversions of great sublety,

with two hands that are ready to indicate how the material world may

be used and with a delicately hirsute skin made to respond emotion-

ally to the dynamics of human touch (Trevarthen, 2001b; 2004b).

Infants start life looking for ways to make conversation by expressing

what they want and how they feel, and soon they are trying to create

compositions, to share the plot of artful games and make them into

legends.

A new science of human sympathy is beginning to give a

neurobiological account of the mimetic abilities that intrigued Aris-

totle and the moral sentiments described so richly by Adam Smith.

One remarkable study using electroencephalography has proved that

the cerebral hemispheres of an 8-week-old baby already possess

organs for the appreciation of a known person’s face, for accepting the

sound of their speech and for being in readiness for expressing a reply

with face and voice (Tzourio-Mazoyer et al., 2002). And we begin to

learn that the brain is a time machine, that it imagines whole plans for

moving in ways the phenomenologists appreciated, and that it shares

these with sympathy of emotions (Gallese, 2005; Panksepp, 2005). No

longer do we have to imagine the cerebral circuits as some great calcu-

lator or tape machine competent only to process sensory information

and learn new algorithms for driving motor action in more intelligent

ways. The neurobiology of sympathy appears to be the primay regula-

tor of development for moving purposes and conscious appraisal of the

likely consequences of action.

150 M. GRATIER AND C. TREVARTHEN

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We have reviewed evidence that the making of meaning in culture

depends on an innate drive for narrative that anticipates and regulates

the drama of interpersonal engagements and brings a foretaste of how

to come to a conclusion that will lead to new beginnings. We have

compared the inventions of jazz with the gently nuanced exchanges of

a mother with a newborn. We have found that writing the story of life

needs the sense of belonging to a community and that this is vital for

well being. We have identified the motives and emotions for culture in

narratives of mother–infant vocal interaction.

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