MusicaeScientiae © 1 9 9 9 by ESCOM European Society

Special Issue 1999-2000, 155-215 for the Cognitive Sciences of M u s i c

Musicality and the intrinsic motive pulse:

evidence from human psychobiology
and infant communication

COLWYN TREVARTHEN
Department of Psychology, The University of Edinburgh

• ABSTRACT
Musicality in human motives, the psycho-biological source of music, is described
as a talent inherent in the unique way human beings move, and hence experience
their world, their bodies and one another. It originates in the brain images of
moving and feeling that generate and guide behaviour in time, with goal-defining
purposefulness and creativity. Intelligent perception, cognition and learning, and
the potentiality for immediate sympathy between humans for expressions of
intrinsic motives in narrative form (linguistic and non-linguistic), depend on this
spontaneous, self-regulating brain activity. It is proposed that evolution of human
bipedal locomotion and the pressure of social intelligence set free a new poly-
rhythmia of motive processes, and that these generate fugal complexes of the
Intrinsic Motive Pulse (IMP), with radical consequences for human imagination,
thinking, remembering and communicating. Gestural mimesis and rhythmic
narrative expression of purposes and images of awareness, regulated by, and
regulating, dynamic emotional processes, form the foundations of human
intersubjectivity, and of musicality. Acquired musical skill and the conventions of
musical culture are animated from this core process in the human mind.
Research on the dynamics of protoconversations and musical games with infants
elucidates the rhythmic and prosodie foundations of sympathetic engagement in
expressive exchanges. Developments in the first year prove the importance of
the impulses of natural musicality in the emergence of cooperative awareness,
and show how shared participation in the expressive phrases and emotional
transformations of vocal games can facilitate not only imitation of speech, but
interest in all shared meanings, or conventional uses, of objects and actions.
Disturbances of early communication attributable to emotional unavailability of a
depressed mother, or those due to sensory, motor or emotional handicap that
causes a child to fail to react in an expected normal way, both confirm the crucial
function in the development of intelligence and personality of sympathetic motives
shared between adult and child in a secure and affectionate relationship, and offer
a way of promoting development by supporting these motives. These facts
establish that the parameters of musicality are intrinsically determined in the brain,
or innate, and necessary for human development. Through their effects in
emotional integration and the collaborative learning that leads to mastery of
cultural knowledge, cultural skills, and language, they express the essential
generator of human cognitive development.

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 Music AND MUSICALITY

Music, as most of us understand it, is certainly an artefact. Like language, it

is learned. Like poetry or literature, it is culture that skilled humans invent, practice,
consciously construct and "know". Its more intricate and majestic structures lift us
out of time. But the universal power of music excites some time-conscious source in
human nature, something that reveals what is intuitively expected in human acting
and the immediate experience of moving. In many cultures music-making and song
are inseparable from celebration of drama, dance and ceremony. We, in the literate
Western world, tend to set music apart and have a word for it, a word that has
narrowed in meaning compared to the ancient Greeks' idea of "mousiki".
How does music come to life? However slight it may be, a piece of music is, in
part, a memory of a musician's creative imaginings in sound. It is attached to some
conventional idea of a musical form. Bjorkvold (1992) calls the wordless voice-play
of the school playground "children's musical culture". Even these rhyming taunts
and jingles are in a tradition, one kept alive by the children. They have cherished
form and rules. The Papoušeks traced the learning of traditional German songs by
their infant daughter, and her creative reproduction, with increasing skill, of these
and other musical and prosodie forms through her second year (Papoušek and
Papoušek, 1981). They emphasise that the child was both imitating and exploring
the musical models, intuitive and skilled, that were "taught" by mother and father.
More sophisticated "art" musical inventions push to their limits the demands of the
imaging, thinking and remembering mind, and the performing body, voice and
musical instruments, as they elaborately explore contrived laws of musical form.
But even the most "difficult" invention and learning of music is obedient, in its
making, to impulses felt in the body. The quality of any musical "performance" is
judged with reference to felt aesthetic principles that defy reason. In the case of jazz,
the improvising skill is dominated by the mysterious forces of foot-tapping, head-
wagging "swing", and the invasion of the space of the instrument by hands that
know where they are going and that sing with a dancing body as well as with the
voice, as David Sudnow (1978) explains.
All music made by musicians is creative, exploring novelty in transformations
and "sameness and difFerence" in the flow of musical form (Deliège and Mélen,
1997), as it was for the Papoušeks daughter (loc. cit.). At the same time as it recites
tradition, music-making needs to break free of history and rules. It is seeking after
new patterns and narratives that will offer drama on first hearing, and that can
stimulate excitement, inspiration and the impulse to sing and dance. In this creative
mode, music is insistently new, and yet its melodies, its textures and its architectural
shapes often become unforgettable and fixed, out of time. However it is described
and wherever it is found, every piece of music is still an invented product of
"culture", full appreciation of it being an acquired skill. New, but unforgettable;
intuitive, but learned, cultivated and skilful; timeless but made inside rime •— the
experience of music seems full of paradox. To find its source we will have to

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understand what action or process music develops from. Then we might be able to
appreciate what in it remains powerfully moving, in independence of the effects of
sophisticated experience — why music lasts.
Musicality, the psychological source of music, seems to be an eternal, given
psycho-biological need in all humans. Even though few in any society may be
known as musicians, professional story-tellers in sound, all of us are, as Blacking
observed (1979), "musical" from birth. The rhythmic impulse of living, moving and
communicating is musical, as is the need to "tell a story" in "narrative time", a need
that is inseparable from the human will to act with imagination of the consequences.
Music satisfies a rich pleasure in our responses to the grain and multilayered
arabesques of sound. It is in this sense that musicality precedes and underlies
language in the life of a child. Musicality, because it is in each and all of us,
permanently, compels sympathy of interest and moving across all cultural and
historical differences between individuals and communities, and from infancy to old
age. This is its adaptive value. We all possess the same fundamental capacity to
respond musically, however different our cultures of music may be.
Why, in what way, is musicality part of us? What is the special feature of human
purpose and lived experience that makes rhythm, harmony and contrasts of melodic
form naturally attractive to us? There would appear to be no easy answer to this
question from scientific analysis of the auditory perception or cognition of the
sound input to a listener's ear, or from theories of the timeless logical hierarchies or
architectonic structures in music written down. The literature in this analytical
tradition is arcane and frustrating. Ir seems we have to go to the source of experience
in acting, the generative images of moving, to find a convincing account, to balance
the reasoned explanation and give it authenticity; and we have to give a central role
in our explanation to the sense of time in moving — the time it takes to step, jump,
glide, hit, grasp, lift, throw, caress, or to think and talk — the measures and tensions
of time that originate in the mind inwardly and become an outputThe dynamic
repetitive impulse that is cultivated and remembered in music is present in the way

(1) The neglect of the sense of time on contemporary psychology and linguistics is astonishing. For
example, in the MIT Encylopedia of Cognitive Science (Wilson and Keil, 1999), just published with
4 7 3 entries, none — on memory (short term, long term, etc.), prosody, poetic metre, thinking,
speech, language, mental representation... — have any reference to actual durations in mental
activity or brain time. There are no entries for "reaction time", or "rhythm", or "music". The only
entry I could find in which the time of intrinsic mental events is explicitly discussed and interpreted
is that on "Time in the Mind" by Pöppel and Wittmann {loc cit), and infants' acute sensitivity to
timing of expressions is mentioned in my entry on "Intersubjectívity" (Trevarthen, 1999).
Contemporary cognitive psychology appears to have "mislaid time". The same can be said for
linguistics. Thus, David Crystal, in his beautifully illustrated new Cambridge Encyclopedia of
Language (Crystal, 1997) has deleted the information on the durations of vocalisations from many
of his figures, and the timing of prosodie and poetic elements is not given. Rhythm is treated as a
formal pattern or structure of sequential events, with the phenomena of time removed.

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we have to move in our bodies no matter what we are doing, and this same impulse
is both anticipated and reflected in all the senses, synchronously, as they seek, pick
up and assimilate overlapping and transforming images of the effects of moving. We
experience seeing, hearing, touching, weighing and thrusting against the objects of
our acting with the exact rhythms and accelerations of the movements themselves2.
An intrinsic motive process drives the action and awareness of the purposeful and
aware subject.
Furthermore, the audible gestures that make music meaningful, memorable, and
above all sharable, come from this same source of created "poetic" time (Jones,
1990). It is, as we shall explain, an established fact of cerebral nature that the
generative impulses and images of moving in each human self are attracted to the
impulses that move others by a powerful sympathy. This is a key feature of our
innate musicality, Musicality is a communicated talent, and it is a talent for
communicating in live company. The fact that we all express essentially the same
parameters of musicality, which are evidently innate in all of us, causes us to feel in
others the same forces of will and curiosity that impel ourselves to act. We
sympathetically receive from other persons the same internally generated beat and
"intonation" of muscular actions that link our own limbs in co-ordinated purposes,
because we instinctively have to. We hear similar colour in sound, and have similar
preferences for the intricacy and balance of musical form. We can actively
participate with companions in intimate worlds of experience, and we can know
that we do, because we all attend to the situations we are in by the same measured
orientations and gestures of investigation. In consequence, our cerebral vitality is
fatally and infectiously musical, whether we are musicians or not.
The sound of this vitality moving, its rhythms and energetic accents, is
transmitted by footsteps, the rustling, ringing, knocking, sliding, booming, clattering
of objects we manipulate, the sounds of the tools that carry out our work, and
by the vocalisations of emotion and thought in cries, calls and articulated sequences
of song and speech. Our hands are agile servants of the impulse to express in gestures
the dynamic motive forms of looking, touching and feeling. That must be why
hands can, so readily, cause musical instruments to speak with a multitude of voices
that are more versatile, at least in physical range, than sounds made by vocal cords
and mouth — why hands can sing so well. The common currency of all these
expressions of human vitality is the source of time in movement we are born with,
and the feeling we have of its rhythms and changing pressures, and the "grain" of its
muscular execution.
Developmental research brings evidence that the essential features of what
we may call the Intrinsic Motive Pulse or IMP of musicality are evident in the

(2) In Gibson's ecological perception theory, the "theory of affordances" (Gibson, 1979),
responsibility for awareness of reality is give to the dynamic "invariants" in environmental
information that the subject "picks up" while acting. But the contribution from the timing and
body-related shaping of the subject's Innate motive processes is assumed, and not explained.

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movements, orientations of attention and sympathetic expressive responses of

infants — either when they are in play with adult musicality, or when they are
responding to artificial fragments of musical sound (Baruch and Drake, 1997;
Demany, 1979; Fassbender, 1996; Fridman, 1980; Lynch et al., 1995; Papoušek, H.,
1996; Papoušek, M., 1994, 1996; Papoušek and Papoušek, 1981; Stern, 1971,
1974, 1993; Stern et al., 1977; Trehub, 1987, 1990;Trehub et al., 1993; Trehub,
Schellenberg and Hill, 1997; Trevarthen, 1986a, 1987, Trevarthen et al., 1999;
Zentner et al., 1996). Infants listen with perceptive preferences to the sounds of
speech, singing and music. And song and music make them move in rhythm and
register interest and happiness, as we shall show. Their behaviour proves both the
innately determined and adaptive value of musicality as an attribute or power of the
human mind, and its importance for the development of human awareness3. The
findings of the past three decades concerning infants' readiness to communicate
have surprised psychologists because the physicalistic scientific models of how
cognition and learning develop by "construction" have not expected them. The
intrinsic, a priori, regulation of mentation for acting, and for sympathising with
acting by attending to its signals, has been missed.

T H E NATURE OF T H E I N T R I N S I C MOTIVE PULSE ( I M P )

IN MUSICALITY O F T H E BODY AND BRAIN

The natural history of innate musicality sets psychological science several tasks. First
we must conceive the natural inner constraints or motives of musical behaviours, and
how to separate them from the infinite variety of skills and learned patterns of music
(Clynes, 1983; Flowers et al., 1995; Jones, 1976, 1982; Jones and Boltz, 1989;
Trevarthen, 1993b, 1998a, b). We have to stop thinking of music forms as physical
objects of auditory perception and cognition — as if we would ever be capable of
understanding music ifall we could do was hear the sounds in it, like a tape recorder
feeding into a sound sorting system! We have to look to, and listen for, the original
generative forms of the impulse to express the dynamic patterns of our minds in
communicable forms. We have to recall what happens when music is made.
And, in a modern scientific world that believes it should identify all mind
processes with brain activity, we will want to build some kind of theory of the
neural mechanisms that can move and feel the body in these musical ways, and that

(3) Ian Cross (1999) identifies the human talent for music with "the most important thing we ever
did" — the evolution of intermodal cognition. This is viewed as the crucial integrating factor
between "modules" of intelligence — cognitive processing territories of the brain. However, Cross
also endorses the contribution of Merlin Donald's " mimesis" (Donald, 1991), which implies a
sympathetic awareness of bodily movement in others, and response to the rhythms of posture and
gesture in narrative expression. The talent and need for music is directly and immediately
important in human communication, whatever it may offer for cognition. If it integrates processes
of thought and consciousness, it does so with emotion.

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can mirror the effects and emotions of other persons' bodies moving, and pick up
their musicality. This is a tall order, given the rudimentary knowledge we possess of
what co-ordinates mental activity in the brain. We must take care we do not trivialise
the task, missing the adaptive significance of musical awareness and musical thinking.
Musicality, as the activity of a unitary "self" or "individuality" expressing motives
to move, is organised in one connected time frame. It cannot be synthesised or
accreted in the mind from separately anarchic processes, but must have one coherent
and orderly rhythmic foundation. It expresses an integral stream of events created in
the whole brain, which conduct separate body parts to targets in a real or imagined
space-time of experience, synchronising moves so the effects of separate actions can
balance one another and form anticipated sequences and coincidences in space and
time, as nearly faultlessly as possible. The gracefulness of all we do depends on it.
Musicality must, therefore, be caused in neural systems that represent, or rather
actively generate or "make", well-regulated transformations of the body as one system.
Body-maps in the brain, somatotopic nets of ordered neural activity, are indispensable
if motor outputs and sensory inputs are to move and guide the body and its parts in
such predictable, controlled ways, and some fully-integrated core mechanism must
activate, knit together and sequence the functions of the innumerable somatotopic
assemblies of neurons in cortices, nuclei and tracts of the brain, and, finally, this
mechanism must take in reafferent information to keep track of what it is "doing".
We have identified this system as the Intrinsic Motive Formation or.IMF of the
brains reticular and limbic core (Trevarthen and Aitken, 1994).
There is evidence from embryology that, indeed, an integrated body-imaging
core system is formed in the brain of a human embryo, and that it acts as the
morphogenetic regulator of the intentional-cognitive systems of the neocortex,
which develop in the foetus and continue elaborating after birth (O'Rahilly and
Müller, 1994). The same neuronal anatomy persists throughout life in the brain
stem, basal ganglia and limbic structures as the Emotional Motor System (Holstegc
et al„ 1997). As this functions to integrate the subjects attention, learning and the
self-regulatory physiology with actions of expression and execution, we have called
it the Intrinsic Motive Formation (IMF) and examined its role in normal and
abnormal psychological growth (Trevarthen and Aitken, 1994; Trevarthen et ai,
2000). After birth the IMF determines both expressive and receptive states, setting
preferences and aversions that guide learning and the maturation of skills.
Here I wish to specify in more detail the functions of the IMF. As a co-ordinator
and regulator of movements and their prospective sensory control it contains
generators of neural time and dynamic tension. These create and integrate a hierarchy
of motor rhythms, with varying qualities of expression or "performance". The body-
moving rhythmic and emotionally modulated system is the Intrinsic Motive Pulse
or IMP. Musicality, the active part of it at least, is the aurally appreciated expression
of the activity of the IMF, with the IMP as its agent. The more reflective or
contemplative side of musical consciousness, the listener's music, must gain its
primary values from standards of emotive power and harmony or "beauty" that are
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set within the receptive architecture of the IMF (Turner, 1985, 1991)4. However, I
am attending most particularly to the making side because I regard that as primary
both in the generation of states of consciousness, and in the development of
intelligence through a combination of investigative curiosity and communication
(Trevarthen, 1998a, b).
In the generating and regulating core of the brain, the IMF, movement-creating
reticular networks and nuclei are intricately combined with the neurochemical
systems of emotion. The same activating neurones that select movements and
control their energy and smoothness also cause changes in the emotions felt, and the
intensity and "colour" of consciousness. That is why it is next to impossible to find
drugs that will treat the symptoms of illusory awareness and panic in psychosis
without unwanted side effects in motor restlessness or dis-co-ordination. The musical
impulse moves the body and also involves the excites neurochemistry of felt elation
and sadness, or of vitality and repose.
In imagination and memory these moods and acute transitions in affect are
associated with knowledge of specific objects, events, persons perceived and
adventures shared. The cognitive residue of consciously acting and experiencing
represents the emotion for that object, or in that moment. The time frame of the
moving that first created the experience is faintly recalled, or lost entirely.
It is the same with music. Its beauty can derive from "emotion recollected in
tranquillity", and the form and texture of the sound may be appreciated with
timeless pleasure or excitement. The melody and drama can be "re-cognised" by a
listener, or "envisioned" by a composer in an instant, and the score can be laid out
and "cut and pasted" intellectually, without recalling the movement of the IMP. But
as soon as the music is made, by singing or playing or even by vividly "hearing" it
in the mind, the pulse and emotional variation of movement is back in place,
proving that it was present unconsciously in the architecture of the music all
along. As with language, which can be perceived, stored and studied as a timeless
structure, but which is made in the time of expressive conversation, the activity of
music is full of gestural rhythms and emphasis. The harmony of the performance or
intonation and "voice quality" or timbre is in the precise composition of the motor
preparation and its effective enactment.
Emotions of anticipation, fear, excitement, joy, anxiety, interest, and the rest arise
from one's anticipation in acting. They are conveyed to others by movements of

(4) Turner (1985,1991) accounts for our pleasure in beauty of all kinds as an evolutionary response
to order and process in nature, and indeed in the universe. It is a feature of our natural constitution
that enables us to respond with understanding intelligence to what nature offers for appreciation
and use. I would give a special place in the excitement from beautiful creations of music to the
sympathetic sense that singles out the forms, activities and artificial creations of other human bodies
and minds for emotional appreciation. That is, the most moving sense of beauty in music may be
that which has a moral implication, and not just an aesthetic one. Turner is, of course, not excluding
the sense of human beauty, and he and Pöppel have specifically addressed the appreciation of the
beauty in "mind time" as this is conveyed in poetic metre {Turner and Poppet, 1988).

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our face, throat and hands, the same mobile sensors that prepare the selective
application of our awareness for the reception of discrete experiences implicated in
the main course action — the whole commitment of the body. Our posture and the
way we step and turn also conveys feelings. Musicality is the coordination of this
acting emotionally, and its channelling into an imagined narrative of purposes with
concern for their consequences. The moral and spiritual tone of music, or its festival
vigour and passion, arises from the instantaneous sympathy of a listeners response
to the action of making sounds with that tempo and in that way.

T H E PHYSIOLOGY O F EFFECTIVE MOTIVES, AND T H E EMOTIONS THAT EVALUATE THEM

From a biologist's position, animal movement, of the individual, has two

fundamental requirements. It looks to prospective regulation of behaviour in
relation to a world outside the body. There are also internal needs for regulation that
the animal's neural net or brain must anticipate. Behaviour must be efficiently, and
prospectively, coordinated, and it must be safe or beneficial to the life of the mover in
its effects within the body and in transactions with the outside world. These are sine
qua non for an animal's prosperous survival in the world.
In social species, movement has further communicative "self-other" or
interstibjective functions that must anticipate and regulate the contingencies of
other individuals' intelligent behaviour. In a society, both the inner and the outer
regulations of individuals, their motives and emotions, become coordinated in new
ways affecting their collective life (Trevarthen, 1992, 1993a, 1998a, 1999).
The pioneering Russian physiologist of motor coordination, Bernstein (1967),
demonstrated that the muscular and incrtial force dynamics of the mulri-jointed
limbs of a human agent come clearer, more graceful and more efficient as actions in
sport or work of any kind become more skilled. As the task and the body's mechanics
become assimilated to the purposeful mind of the performer, the body becomes the
obedient ally of the will. Rhythm in doing things is, Bernstein found, a bio-mechanical
necessity, and the origin of it has to be in the perception-anticipating processes of
the brain, and in the active neu rally-generated sense of change in coherent time. The
effort of purpose in skilled movement demonstrates both the periodic impulse or
"kinematics" of acting and the regulated "energetics" or force of gesture. These
dimensions are signatures of the brain's control of changes in body form (Trevarthen,
1986a, 1998b).
A psychobiological view considers that autonomic adjustments — of respiration,
of circulation of the blood, of the glands and viscera — arise from the anticipations
of risk or benefit to the organism, or to the self-conscious subject caring about what
is to be done, of moving and spending energy to engage the environment (Porges,
1997; Panksepp, 1998a, b). Perfectly skilled action that totally and precisely specifies
its course and targets is rarely possible, and most acts have as their purpose some
efficient use of a not entirely predictable object taken from the environment. There
are always risks or uncertain contingencies to estimate, and evasions or corrections
to be made in moves that have the potentiality for benefiting the body, or for
stressing or harming it. While external stimuli are anticipated as goals for intelligent
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action and located in body-centred time and space, the internal physiological state
and dynamic homeostasis of the organism must also be made ready for every effort
and experience anticipated, and the potential dangers or benefits of every object to
be dealt with. The physiologically adaptive, life-protecting quality of acting must be
estimated, specified, and signalled back to the anticipatory motive processes of the
mind, as well.
Primitive emotions have a dimension of force, energy or "arousal" derived from
the motive image of the action that they regulate, and a second dimension related
to the positive or negative, pleasurable or painful effects expected in the body, and
hence related to the approach/avoidance motivation or "value" in the intended
action. They also evaluate the efficiency, elegance and grace, or conversely the
roughness and harshness, of moves of the self and of others. This is how emotions
can be explained at the first level, for a simple creature moving about. The emotions
of conscious, imaginative and sympathetic humans have other forms and functions,
retained and transformed in the values of thought and recollection. Nevertheless,
emotions always develop from their service to the anticipating function of images
and plans for acting.

M O T O R IMAGINATION, AND " O R C H E S T R A T I O N " OF PURPOSES AND PASSIONS

Recent researches on the bio-mechanics, perceptuo-motor regulations and

physiology of movements have made significant discoveries that support and extend
Bernstein's theories (Whiting, 1984; Jeannerod, 1994, 1999). The evidence
indicates that attempts to reduce his hypothesis of intrinsic motive processes
(Bernstein, loc. cit., used the term ecphorator to designate the inner agency that
drives moving with control) to a physical "dynamic systems" account (dependent on
the idea that networks and cell assemblies of the brain undergo plastic accommodation,
compliently, to emergent peripheral kinetic forces), cannot explain the rhythmic
efficiency, and particular rhythmic values, of natural movements. Motor action is
not an effect "caused by" perceptual and cognitive processes. It has to be "geared to"
environmental information, but it is not passively moved by it. Movement originates
from spontaneous processes in the brain that are adapted to take measured prospective
or anticipatory control over sensed consequences5.

(5) Lee (1998) has formulated a theoretical "tau" function that defines movement to a goal, or to
"close a gap" in space and time. Information in the mind about the "tau" of a gap, the time to
closure at the current closure-rate, can be used to control movement across the gap. The theoretical
function has been supported by data from numerous experiments on movements of many species
of animal to various goals in the environment, the performance of car drivers and athletes,
movements of drumming and piano playing, and by studies of how a human subject coordinates
the movements of different parts of the body with each other. Intrinsic "taus" govern the latter
coordinations, within-the-subject gap closures, and "intrinsic tau" theory can be applied to the
coordination between subjects, as in conversation or playing music together. In tau theory the
"intrinsic tau guide" determines the duration (or frequency) of the movement, as well as details of its
time course, and translates in mathematical terms emotion or the expressive aspects of the
movement.

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 Studies comparing the time taken to imagine doing a task or action and the real
time of performing the movements prove that the mind accurately "represents" the
moving body in time and space, and that when purposes are generated all parts of
the body are conceived in their dynamic and anatomical relations (Jeannerod,
1999). It is also clear from the ways people interact socially that these mental or
cerebral "motor images" of the body in action serve efficiently to represent other
persons' bodies and their intentions in behaviour. There is physiological data to
support the theory of motor images that give prospective regulation to actions, and
even to explain how motor actions and their intentions are conveyed sympathetically,
or mirrored imitatively and co-operatively, between subjects (Di Pelligrino et al,
1992; Rizzolatti and Arbib, 1998; Jeannerod, loc. cit).
Neuropsychological tests of how persons move after injury to parts of the brain,
and brain scan research to locate foci of neural activity when actions are performed
or imagined, can support a notion of where images of intended action and the
executive centres that activate movement are located in the brain. The findings can
also help us understand how motor images assimilate sensory inputs into processes
of perceptual imagery and memory. But, brain anatomy, brain development,
neurophysiological explorations, tests of the effects of lesions or surgical disconnection
of the cerebral hemispheres, and psychological studies of consciousness in active
subjects all indicate that motor images, or motives, have a primary regulatory role
over awareness and cognition (Trevarthen, 1990; Trevarthen and Aitken, loc. cit.).
Consciousness and thinking are initiated by purposes. No functional brain scan
research can locate perception, thinking or remembering that is free of motives and
their emotions — and these will depend on activity in widespread cortical and
subcortical neural assemblies (Damasio, 1994).
The internal representations of action in the brain necessarily recruit and serve
emotions, for the reasons outlined above. These arise from, or are intimately linked
to, self-regulatory systems that determine the internal state and functions of the visceral
body — circulation of the blood, breathing and respiration, feeding and digestion,
mating and reproduction, protection and care of self and others (MacLean, 1970;
Damasio, loc. cit.; Porges, loc. cit.; Holstege et al., loc. cit.; Panksepp, 1998a;
Trevarthen and Aitken, loc. cit.). The autonomic and hormonal systems are active in
preparation for action, and when there is a threat to the well-being of the body, or a
conceived threat, or the prospect of some desirable and beneficial effect in the vital
condition of the body, they influence action and awareness accordingly. Thus we
must conceive a sharing of responsibility in motivation between actions directed to
engage the outside physical world, and internal processes that are nurturing or
caring for the body of the self. Caring processes are also capable of extending concern
for the self to another for whom there is affectionate regard, and intuitive
sympathetic feeling is manifest in children at an early age (Bråten, 1996). The
sympathetic, intersubjective side of human motives, consciousness and emotions is
considered below. It is, of course, fundamental to communicative musicality.

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These two kinds of instinctive regulation of the psychological aspects of life, to

act assertively against objects, or to protect and assimilate subjectively, have been
called ergotropic (turning to "ergon", Greek for "work" or "business") and trophotropic
(turning to the nurturance of a "trophos", Greek for "feeder") (Hess, 1954;
Trevarthen et al., 2000). Again, brain science brings abundant evidence that the
emotions are a part of the core mechanism, that they are parallel to the system that
generates purposeful activity of all kinds (Holstege et al., loc, cit.). The unconsciously
generated emotions and motives are integrated with the discriminating and strategic
operations of consciousness, memory and skill, modulating them. Musicality
implicates and expresses both "ergic" and "trophic" representations in the moving
mind or spirit (Wallin, 1991).

T H E SOCIABILITY OF T H E I M P , AND ITS MUSICALITY

No manifestation of an animals purposeful, sentient life, no expression of the activity

of the IMF can affect other individuals in a society if it is not communicated. Socially
cooperating animals share both the coordinated impulses of their wills, and the
emotions by which they regulate their individual situations of well-being and the
risks to their lives (Marler eta/., 1992). Both the ergotropic and trophotropic aspects
of anticipatory motives become directly mirrored or engaged between them. Their
brains, working through the actions of their bodies, "reflect" one another's' purposes,
feelings and experiences6.
The characteristics of human moving that we are calling "musicality" are innately
adapted to be inter-mental, inter-subjective phenomena transmitting information
about rhythms in minds of human actors. Musicality appears to be a human
psychological process intimately linked with the unique intensity of the human need
to make, learn and transmit meaning in the experience of acting in common social
experience. And its uniqueness is, I believe, rooted in the peculiar way we, as an
intensely social species, walk about in the world, manipulate it and express our
selective will and imagination in polyrhythmic narratives of bodily mime while we
share person-person-object awareness. Our expressiveness has intersubjective and
reflective "aboutness" —• it is purposeful, self-conscious (Searle, 1983), and, more
than that, it can tell something to someone. Musicality (in dance and theatre,
and all dramatic occasions, as well as music) is about the essential temporal and
emotional quality of purpose with a human body in awareness of human company,
and it need owe nothing to language or practicality. It is one manifestation of the

(6) Bråten (1988, 1992, 1998) has considered the essential representational requirements of
efficient intermental life in "companion space". He postulates a "virtual other" represented in the
mind of each cooperatively thinking agent that engages "e-motionally", or through movement,
with actual others in "felt immediacy". The sympathetic abilities of infants in "protoconversational"
engagements attests the existence of such a representation.

165
 engine of being alive in society, making "human sense" of the world shared with
concern or "cared about" (Donaldson, 1978; 1992). It is part of the sensibility and
responsibility out of which we negotiate mutual actions and relationships, regulat-
ing one another's feelings of worth and well-being in the "pride/shame continuum"
(Barnes, 2000).
The pulse and rhythm of music conveys information about the dynamic images
behind action of the whole body of a person and its multifarious motor systems
acting in concert. The foundation is the beat of walking, with an overlay or
embellishment of faster gestures, and the phrasing expresses cycles of attending to
experience and the actions and plans of intending. Polyrhythmic and polyphonic
patterns express the intricate, and often simultaneous, coordinations of these
different levels of action in the "time of the mind" (Pöppel and Wittmann, 1999;
Wittmann and Pöppel, this volume) 7 .
Musical dynamics transmit information about emotions, and excite emotional
experiences in listeners and performers. These changes are not just discrete categories
of reaction to specific stimulus forms or signs. They are "context-sensitive", Í. e.
prospectively synthesised and recollected, series of transitional events that express
the changes in motives behind moving in a conscious purposeful way. Slow
qualitative changes of pitch, loudness, quality or harmony of sounds in the voice or
a musical instrument can convey deep emotions, their waxing and waning, and
cycles of departure and return, desire and withdrawal extending over many seconds.
Acute emotion exhibit sharp contrasts in intensity, harshness, force, purity or
harmony in vocal or instrumental sound. In everyday life these expressions, coupled
to similarly expressive movements of the face and hands, which have the same
dynamic dimensions as vocal gestures, give essential signals about the moment-by-
moment progress of thought and action between the self and others; or between
protagonists, be they viewed from a third person's place in reality, or represented in
an imagined narrative myth. The full range of inner motive processes of living,
attending, acting and experiencing can be conveyed musically, even though there
may be no definite representation in the music of objects or events in a world out-
side minds. All music is information of what makes minds move, feel and recall. It
is information from within, not news of the world.
Brain time, or mind time, can be measured — indeed it can be considered the
measure of all human sense of time. Table I summarises the scale of times common
to different functions in spontaneous motive processes and in regulations of the
conscious mind as they appear in actions and communicative expressions of human
children and adults. It draws on different manifestations of motive dynamics and
rhythm recorded by a wide variety of means. There seems to be agreement on a
limited set of fundamental levels of mental time, each confined within a definite

(7) A video film o n m o v e m e n t of the body in walking, dancing, playing and working that
powerfully illustrates the polyrhythmic fluency of the human body has been produced by Froshaug
and Aahus (1995), based on The Muse Within by the musicologist Bjcrkvold (1992).
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 Musicality and the Intrinsic motive pulse
COLWYN TREVAKTH EN

physical range of times. These are real innate, prefunctionally developed anatomico/
physiological components permeating the neural systems, holding groups of neurons
in synchronously active communities with different periodic tendencies, different
dynamic flexibilities and different relations with parts of the body, linking all parts
in a coherent federation that gives the acting and perceiving self its temporo-spatíal
integrity. Their relation to the dynamic standards of musicality is evident (Jones,
1976, 1982; Jones and Boltz, 1989; Fraisse, 1982; Epstein, 1995). Motive time may
be derived from very ancient motive elements driving animal life (Gallistel, 1980),
but they have a new vitality in human consciousness.
Motives and emotions unite on the coordination of purpose and passion in
movement and experience. In dance and music, very slow movements convey
introspective, "spiritual", abstract emotional states and the "disembodied" and
"irrational"narrative flow of feelings and recollections, "out of body" and "out of
mind". Quick expressive movements, with varied force, convey information about
transient or momentary and instinctive emotional changes or reactions, and these
are more directly associated with cognitive operations of conscious perception,
language and "declarative" memory, and combinations of the same8.

I F ONLY HUMANS ARE M U S I C A L , WHY?

I believe human musicality is unique in the world of animals because our motives,
consciousness and communication are different from those of other animals5. More
fundamentally, we are musical, and beasts are little or not, because we have evolved
with a different posture and a different kind of motor coordination. Individual acts
may not be swifter or surer, and formulated sequences may not be more graceful and

(8) Clynes has demonstrated that dynamic forms of expressive movement, either in the voice or in
manual touch pressure, can be identified as signatures or "sentie forms" for different emotions. The
time, space and vital qualities of living are differently represented in the rhythms of action and the
ebb and flow, or sharp transitions, of emotion (Clynes, 1973, 1 9 8 0 , 1 9 8 3 ; Clynes and Nettheim,
1982). Rather than specific signature shapes for categories of emotion, sentie forms may be
conceived as configurations of transforming motor effort, manifesting qualities of the successive
states or transitions of the IMP in the course of single expressions of feeling.
(9) However intricately beautiful to our ears bird song or the song of the whale may be, and
however inspiring to a composer, neither of these forms of animal expression is either freely
"conversational" or unrestricted "narrative making". A bird may learn a song by a kind of mimesis
in an early "critical period" of the development of the bird's brain, but the form practised is not
"negotiated" intersubjectively, and it is not infinitely variable in its message as human songs are.
Every bird's song has a very strong inherent template, which enables an ornithologist to identify
the species, or even the sub-species, of a bird he cannot see. The musicat "culture" of bird
vocalisations, even those that mimic echoically other species and environmental sounds, is perhaps
more limited than that of a newborn infant who has learned songs a mother has sung as she
waited for the birth.

167
 Table
M o t i v e T i m e s of adult a c t i o n s a n d e x p e r i e n c e s in c o n s c i o u s n e s s of
n e r v o u s s y s t e m , and o n t i m e s a l l o c a t e d t o c o m p o n e n t p r o c e s s e s
n e w b o r n Infants are a l s o g i v e n ( s e e a l s o infants' v o c a l i s a t i o n s and v o c a l
a f e w t e n s of s e c o n d s are s u s t a i n e d in t h o u g h t and i m a g i n a t i o n b y
processes that give them conventional meaning,

ťRL-CuNíiCloUíi I
Milliseconds
A B C D
5-20 ms. 30-40 ms. 50-100 ms. 150-200 ms.
Machine Symbol system; Cognitive; smallest
Intelligence. involuotary. deliberate act
Access and retrieval
SOAR system a from LTM. Decision cycle
Event Related Brain stem Sensory potentials, N200 'Mismatch'
Potentials b responses NI00 'Attention' wave.
Physiology wave.
Sleep, Autonomic
Physiology c

Psycho-physics d Minimal Temporal 'Click-scnsitive' Au lo mated finger

perceived order oscillators. tapping
interval threshold Internal clock unit e
Eye and Eye-saccade Inter-saccade
Head orientations duration interval.
Head-rotation
duration
Reading f Visual input to Oculomotor latency.
cortex. Pre-striate Short visual fixation.
& parietal visual Frontal attention
feature detection. waves.
Speech Voice Fast Lip & tongue Articles, prefixes.
Onset articulations Counting fast.
Tune
Walking Fast reflex Step, heal-to-toe
Manipulating Reflexes, Finger articulations
twitches Tapping
Interpersonal Onset-onset time
timing In Overlaps
conversation Interruptions
Music Trills Vibrato

Poetry Unstressed syllable

SinRinR Vibrato
Melodic contours Fast, bursting
Utterances, Fast gesture or
gestures, expression. Wink.
expressions Laugh, spasm, gasp.
Patting fast.

Neonate Infants £ Duration of eye Blink.

saccade. Quick head turn.
Short syllable in coo.

a
Newell, A. (1990). Unified theories of cognition. Cambridge MA: Harvard University Press;
b
Coles, M. G. H., & Rugg, A t D. (1995). Event related brain potentials: an introduction. In
M. D. Rugg and M G. H. Coles (eds). Electrophysiologic of mind: event related brain potentials
and cognition (pp. 1-26). Oxford: Oxford University Press;
c
Delamont, R. S„ Julu, P. O. O., & Jamal. G. A. (1999). Periodicity of a noninvasive measure
of cardiac vagal tone during non-rapid eye movement sleep in non-sleep-deprived and sleep-
deprived norma/ subjects. Journal of Clinical Neurophysiology. 16(2), 146-153;
d Wittmann, M., & Poppet, B. (1999). TemporaI mechanisms of the brain as fundamentals of
communication — with special reference to music perception and performance. (This volume);

168
 Musicality and the Intrinsic motive pulse
COLWYN TREVARTHEN

I
the present. Information i s g i v e n o n t i m e s f o u n d in p h y s i o l o g i c a l p r o c e s s e s of t h e
in m a c h i n e i n t e l l i g e n c e . S o m e e x a m p l e s o f t h e t i m i n g of s p o n t a n e o u s a c t i o n s o f
e x c h a n g e s p r e s e n t e d by M a l l o c h , 1 9 9 9 ) . P u r p o s e s and e x p e r i e n c e s l o n g e r t h a n
r e p r e s e n t a t i o n s in perceptual i m a g e s and l a n g u a g e , and b y t h e c o g n i t i v e
emotional value and causal connections
I CONSCIOUS 1 IMAGINED AND RECALLED
Minutes &
Seconds Longer
E F G H I
300-700 ms. 7ÖÖ-15ÜÖ ms. 3-6 s. 10-30 s.
Cognitive; simple selective operation Full průb lem Rational
space; goals. Task
Primitive operators Smallest unit of
learning.
P300 •Oddball" event (parietal) Readiness potential (precentral), Attention Cycle
wave — memory 'up-date'. 'Orienting-wave: 'Ejtpectancy'-
N400 semantic violation wave. wave
Respiratory Mayer waves. 30-50 sec.
Rhythm Vaso-motor Heart; para-
waves sympathetic
cycles
Consciously-controlled action Subjective
Short Term Memory present.

Ocu lomolor
'Scan path"
Separate Mead orientations
Long visual fixation.
S ig ht-to-saccade interval.
Frontal sentence processing.

Syllable, vowel. Stow Word Phrase.

articulations. Jaw movements: Breath-cycle.
chewing. talking
Normal walk Slow walk
Fast reach, pick up, grasp. Reaching slowly Manipulative
Hammering Sawing Sequence.
Single utterance. Short tum Long turn

Pulse/beat; Pu t se/beat: Phrase

presto to andante andante to largo
Stressed syllable Foot Phrase Stanza
Beat Bar Pnrase Verse
Controlled Slow, graceful Slow, sedate Timeless';
'Floating'
Head-shake, nod. Glance. Slow smile
Eyebrow raise. Wave. Scowl. Stare
Burst oflaugbter
Patting gently, stroking.
Grimace.
Intersaccadé interval. Head tiim. Pre-reaching lift. Burst interval in
Surge in pre-reaching. Nutritive sucking. non-nutritive
Non-nutritive sucking. Protoconversation sucking. Vocal
Coo, short cry. beat. Respiration. phrase interval.
e
Triesman, M., Cook, N., Naish, P. L N., & MacCrone, J. K. (1994). The internal clock:
electroenceph alograph ic evidence for oscillatory processes underlying time perception.
Quaterly Journal of Experimental Psychology, 47A(2), 241-288;
* Posner, M. I., Abdutlaev, Y. G., McCandliss, B. D., & Šeřeno, S. C (1999). Anatomy, circuitry
and plasticity of word reading. In J. Everatt (ed), Reading and dyslexia: visual and attentional
processes (pp. 137-162). London and New York: Rout!edge;
S Trevarthen, C., Murray, L, & Hubley, P. A. (1981). Psychology of infants. In J. Davis and
J. Dobbing (eds), Scientific foundations of clinical paediatrics, 2nd ed. (pp. 211-274). London:
Heinemann Medical.

169
 efficient, but the intricacy, flexibility, emotionality and narrative power of human
walking, posturing, expressing, gesturing, vocalising and performing all manner of
technical manipulations are greater than the movements of other species. This is
not just a consequence of learning or education. Our innate movements exhibit
exceptionally complex hierarchies and sequences of displacement of the whole body
and its coordinated parts.
Furthermore, human polyrhythmic actions and cycles of investigative orientation
carry messages of a mind that needs to represent imaginary worlds and the fates of
protagonists. It is a mind that sympathises readily with the expression of imaginary
tales of experience in the actions of other persons. Many animals have the ability
to mirror the form and movement of other animate as sentient beings, especially
members of their own species. Horses, dogs and cats respond with understanding to
human attitudes, gestures and vocal expressions. Young apes certainly spend many
years as apprentices in learning the skills of forest life in the society of the highly
intelligent and intimately known members of their family. "Domesticated" apes
have remarkable sympathy with human communication and, through their superior
powers of imitation, can seem to think with language (Rumbaugh and Savage-
Rumbaugh, 1999; Tomasello and Call, 1997; Bard, 1998). Human motives take this
ability in a new direction with new ambitions — one that seeks joint imaginative
experience, that spells out evolving purposes far beyond the present context of
experience, and that presents a human-invented future that is much more than
anything that one person can remember, making fictional novelty of artificial
recollections (Ricoeur, 1981, 1984; Bruner, 1986; Donald, 1991; Akhtar and
Tomasello, 1998). Children and adults alike are easily caught in make-believe
(Harris, 1998).
It is said that hominids have acquired a "Theory of Mind", which monkeys (as
well as infants and autistic children) lack (Whiten, 1991; Baron-Cohen et ai, 1993;
Carruthers and Smith, 1996). In fact we have in our minds a spontaneous
emotionally charged need to share motor impulses and perceptual images that make
us common believers in intricate ideas and companions in ambitious purposes
(Akhtar and Tomasello, 1998; Bråten, 1998; Harris, 1998; Gomez, 1998;
Rommetveit, 1998;Trevarthen, 1998b, 1999). Any "theories" come afterwards, and
are dispensable — really they are just some of the more or less useful myths and
fantastic structural inventions that academic psychologists and Artificial Intelligence
engineers like to build, mathematisise and tell one another about. Common-sense
awareness of other humans and what is happening in their minds, human sympathy,
is atheoretical, whatever things or stories are made of it. The core of being human
is living in a fabric of meaning generated by others of our kind, and this fabric
originates in active forms that are more mythical and poetical than theoretical.
Explanation is only one of its acquired functions, and the efficacy of meaning does
not require to be explained.
Human mental creativity is evident not only in language, however unique
language may be in the precision, fertility and flexibility of its references, or in the
intricacy of its logical constructions independent of present sensations or movements.
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 Musicality and the Intrinsic motive pulse
COLWYN TREVAKTH EN

A person makes meaning in every task he or she performs with conscious interest
and inventive purpose. At the core of human conscious life is a restless impulsiveness
that makes patterns out of the "time in the mind" and out of the form-changes of a
body in movement, a body that has a particular polarity and symmetry, that has
many quasi-independent parts, that is designed to make tangible, visible and audible
to others like it, and who move like it, every nuance of motivation and feelings. The
human body makes awareness of the mass and inertia of its parts and its whole into
conscious signatures of the will to move. The rhythms, energy and tension of
its impulses are combined in "textures" of trying to act and of experiencing the
consequences. These textures of the human IMP become "texts" for other humans
to "read". We play and think and invent with dramatic and metaphorical, rhythm
based, body-related mimesis (Donald, loc. cit.).
All animal and human communication is based on sympathy — for body form
and for body movement10. The motivating power of this sympathy is dear in the
ways animals co-operate as parents, offspring and siblings, as co-operators in group
life, as predators and prey, and especially in the imitations and acrobatic synchronisations
of the young at play (Batcson, 1956; Bekoff and Byers, 1998), with its "serious
ambiguity" (Sutton-Smith, 1998). Human sympathetic consciousness drives endless
creativity in art and technique. The communication that animates this level of
mind-mind sympathy depends on a taste for metaphor — and for myth, which
Northrup Frye, in his writings on "Myth and Metaphor", calls, "a universally
intelligible language" (Frye, 1990, p. 3). Metaphorical sympathy recognises likeness
of quality, form and movement, and it does so with emotion. It refers to all natural
kinds of motives, feelings and states of purpose and awareness.
Human action, freely expressed, has the richest time sense, the richest musical or
poetic potentialities, and the greatest appetite for narrative. This is the character of
our intense sociability and it peculiar fancifulness.

A THEORY OF BIPEDAL MULTI-RHYTHM IN HUMAN EXPRESSIONS AND C O M M U N I C A T I O N

If we watch persons going about their ordinary business, working alone, mingling
and chatting in a crowd, or negotiating and collaborating in a collective task, we see
that, while the human body is built to walk on two legs to an inner drum, at the
same time it is intricately juggling hips, shoulders and head as a tower of separately
mobile parts above the stepping feec. While walking, we freely turn and twist, glance
with eyes jumping to left and right, extend waving limbs, make intricate gestures of
the hands, talk, all in coordinated phrases of flowing rhythm. This moving has a
multiplicity of semi-independent impulses, a potentiality for multi-rhythmic
coordination that is surely richer than any other species possesses, inviting witty

(10) The Scottish philosopher Adam Smith defined "sympathy" by referring to the imitative
mirroring of postures and gestures of a crowd who are watching a street gymnast, and he claimed
that this sympathetic sense is strong in young children (Smith, 1759).

171
iteration and syncopation. We are content also to do many intricate rhyrhmic acts
with only the upper parts of our body, often over long periods of time while seated,
legs relaxed — playing music, chatting, typing, or just devouring the active images
of others on TV with eyes and ears, finger on the channel control. Human patterns
of expression — of the impulse to walk, to dance, to reach and bend, to gesture
signals of attention and purpose, and to lee out feeling with a theatrical gesture, a
melodious call or the rattle of syllables — all this makes a primitive music, with
which we instinctively improvise.
Perhaps, therefore, a biological theory of the origins, causes and functions of
musicality should not focus on the possible evolution of musical behaviour from
bird song, the wonderful sequences of sounds that whales make, the great call of
the gibbon female, and its male accompaniment, or the pant-hoot chorusing
of chimpanzees with news to tell. There are certainly common motivating and
communicative functions of vocal expression in highly social animals, and common
principles of the motor functions behind song-like or dance-like expressions, and
their rhythmic patterns show important resemblance to what we do (Merker, this
volume; Ploog, 1992; Mahler etaL, 1992). But, human musicality has unique features,
and unique consequences for our evolution and development (Papoušek, H., 1996;
Cross, 1999).
The defining characteristic of human existence, of activity and consciousness,
that establishes us as different from our closest hominid relatives is bipedal locomotion
and the upright stance 11 . We love to make the endlessly weaving patterns of music,
I believe, as a consequence of the fact that we are built to balance our long-limbed
and multi-jointed bodies on end against the gravitational pull. This gives us
unparalleled freedom to exercise many differently directed gestures and orientations
of interest, and to iterate these with quasi-independent timing. The accompanying
sense of flexible, creative time, with the productivity of motor sequences, is richer
and freer than in other species, no matter how agile and well-coordinated they may
be. Music making is an expression of how we progress and search about balanced
on end, carrying head, arms and voice free to express their purposes in an imagined
different time from that in which wc walk.
Music is audible gesture, coloured by the same emotions as those that move the
face in expressive patterns linked to visual interest and to the uses of the mouth.
However, unlike the face, music can draw on a deeper range of state expressions, too.
It can, through shifts of vocal tone and slow modulation of vocal pitch and effort,
express intrinsic autonomic and neurochemical regulations, drifts of mood and
imaginary transports of the quality of experience. At the other extreme it conveys
rapid syntactic information articulated either in language or the arm gestures and

(11) Human bipedalism has a long evolutionary history, and it has transformed many functions of
the brain and the body, including the form and suspension of internal organs, and the anatomy of
the vocal tract and face, contributing to the emergence of a respiratory and vocal system with the
potential for speech and a greatly enhanced facial expressiveness, as well as freeing the hands for
both object manipulation and gestural expression (Klein, 1999; Lewin, 1999).

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COLWYN TREVAKTH EN

finger movements of instrumental expression. Music-cum-dance-cum-theatre

exercises the whole range of expressive activities, implicating motives for every level
of the body — somatic and visceral.
The musicality of moving is certainly an essential, innate capacity of our brain
and body, of a mind built to generate, imagine, feel emotional about, remember and
recognise impulses and narratives of movement. With this complex vitality, human
consciousness is given a greatly enriched power of sympathy for the impulses that
escape from other humans' minds in their movements. As music gives expression to
a family of intrinsic pulses in the brain — the beats, rhythms, cyclic phrases and
unfolding, destiny-pursuing narratives generated within it — these time patterns
carry affecting messages. They transmit intimate information about the inner life of
our interacting minds in compelling ways.

A R E INFANTS B O R N WITH MUSICALITY?

The universal features of human musicality, its timing, emotive expression and
intersubjective sympathy, are clear signs of innate motives, and music functions
everywhere as a primary motivating force in human life. Should we not find that at
least the foundations of these talents are possessed by an unsophisticated infant?
Indeed, as has been mentioned, it is remarkable how sensitive infants are to
musical dimensions in maternal vocalisations and in artificial sound patterns
that mimic the human voice. And a very young infant will take critical interest in
coordinating their limited repertoire of movements to the musicality of maternal
expressions. Infant listeners have surprised psychologists who have devised tests and
behavioural analyses to demonstrate what the infants perceive in sound forms.
Infants seem born with a kind of musical wisdom and appetite. Most remarkable
is the precise sensitivity to timing and accurate coordination that even newborns can
show in favourable conditions of intimate communication by sounds, touch and
vibration (Malloch, this volume; van Rees and de Leeuw, 1987). Infants are not just
student listeners.
It is amazing what an infant can hear, and wants to hear. Experiments that
measure the preferential orienting of newborns to voices have proved that they
already recognise acoustic "fingerprints" of their mothers speech, or musical and
poetic sound themes to which the mother has exposed them in utero. So foetuses
can listen, at least in the last trimester of gestation, with musical discrimination, and
they can learn to identify, and seek, a mother's distinctive sounds. There is little for
a foetus to see before birth, but within minutes of coming to the light of the
world a baby can see well enough not only to track an object, but to imitate facial
expressions and gestures of a sympathetically attentive person who is making
demonstrations of these signals. And a newborn human is particularly alert to the
eyes of a person speaking, drawing comfort and regulation of inner state from
the expression of interest and affection that eyes carry with the gentle voice of a

173
 Infants also affect the behaviour of adults strongly. A mother greets her newborn
in ecstatic cries with falling pitch, and by gentle fondling. She is unable to keep her
eyes from the baby's face. She touches hands, face, body with rhythmic care, and
holds the infant close to her so they can join attention and greet one another. Her
speech is a kind of singing, with high gliding gestures of pitch and repetition of
regular gentle phrases on a graceful beat, leaving places for the infant to join in with
coos, smiles and gestures of the hands or whole body. Every move of the baby elicits
a reaction from her. These exchanges are intricately coordinated with a subdued
choreography that brings out matching rhythms and phrasing in mother and infant.
And not only mothers are affected in this way. The example of a "conversation" of
coos between a father and a two-month premature newborn that has been analysed
by Malloch (this volume) illustrates the essential features of a syllabic beat,
phrasing and sympathetic coordination. In this case it is likely that the father's voice
was transmitted to the baby by vibration as much as by air-born sound as the
infant rested one car against his chest.
The timing of the impulses of expressions made by both adult and infant is the
essential foundation for their mutual entrainment and the efficient anticipations
they show of one another's part. Touch, vibration, hearing and sight of gestures and
expressions, all these avenues of perception will serve. The sympathy is intermodal
and its measure is the output of the IMP that gives time and expressive quality to
the expressive movements.
Newborns are weak and rarely alert and fully coordinated for long. They sleep
and lose consciousness. Their attention is sustained only for short intervals.
But within a few weeks both attention, especially visual attention, and motor
coordination are stronger and more efficient. In the second month parents notice a
baby is eager for face-to-face play, and quick to smile. This is the period when
intricately patterned protoconversations take place, and the infant can be enthralled
in a mothers lively talk or singing.

M O T I V E S IN INFANTS: COHERENT EXPRESSIVE ACTIONS, THEIR TIMING,

AND THEIR COMMUNICATION

The graceful integrated movements of foetuses and newborn infants at peace

demonstrate the primacy of a certain kind of coordinated acting at a stage of
development when cognitive strategies are still to be found, and awareness is
severely limited. Compared to the young of other primates, infants develop slowly.
They are late in achieving effective, gravity-defying motor coordination of the whole
body. From the start they are heading along a different, more involved and ambitious
path that leads to a revolutionary level of companionship in animate awareness.
They will employ poly-rhythmic expressiveness in synchrony with the care and
support of their parents to learn the signs of communication in a particular culture.
The precocious freedom of movement of an infants arms and hands, voice and face,
is for communication and imitation, not for locomotion or manipulation. The
communicative potentiality at birth gives evidence of sympathetic mirroring of
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COLWYN TREVAKTH EN

expressions, and a readiness for conversational duets, which develop rapidly within
the care support and playfulness of parents' responses (Brazelton et al., 1974;
Trevarthen, 1979, 1993b, 1997).
Newborn infants show motives with identifiable goals (Trevarthen et al., 1981;
Trevarthen, 1984a, 1997, 1998a). They act coherently, with trunk, the proximal and
distal segments of their limbs and their eyes yoked so that these body parts move
together in flowing transitions. For example, orientations of the two eyes in
synchrony (conjugately) are coupled to rotations of the head and of the shoulders
on the hips, extensions and retractions of the legs and feet, and reaching and
grasping movements of the arms and hands. There is a choreography in these
postural changes that is adapted to turning, stepping towards, reaching after and
grasping an object that has been located visually, even when, as often happens with
a newborn, there is actually no object there as the perceived goal for the "pre-
reaching" or "pre-walking". The timing of the displacements of eyes, head, trunk,
arms and hand is regulated and these separately mobile components show
synchronised pulses in a hierarchy of values that match many of those seen in adult
movement (Tables IA and B). In innate motive impulses, a matching anatomy of
movement, and the same time-space framework provide the common ground for
mutual awareness and interaction between a newborn and an adult (Trevarthen,
1998a, b; Trevarthen et al., 1999).

SYMPATHETIC "MIRRORING" IN INFANT C O M M U N I C A T I O N

Twenty-five years ago, Condon and Sander (1974) reported "entrainment" of

newborn arm movements to the syllabic rhythms of adult speech in any language.
Since the infant can generate the same arm rhythms without any external guide
(Trevarthen, 1974, 1984b; von Hofsten, 1983), this remarkable coordination is
evidently not the consequence of a passive response by the infant to the adult acting
as a "pace-maker", but due to sympathetic cross-modal (auditory to proprioceptive
and possibly visual) matching of actively generated intrinsic pulses in both infant
and adult (Trevarthen, 1986a; Trevarthen et al., 1999). Adult speech is a rhythmic
and hierarchical behaviour (Martin, 1972), though the timing is generally left out
of explanations in phonetics. Infants, even foetuses, are highly perceptive of the
rhythms and phrases of speech (ifMalloch, this volume; and see below).
Newborn infants show selective orientation to and coordinated response to the
mother's vocalisations, facial expressions and hand movements sensed in various
ways and this sensitivity has been proved in rigorous tests that involve the infants in
active imitation of what another person is doing (Heimann and Schaller, 1985;
Heimann, 1989; Kugiumutzakis, 1985,1993, 1998,1999; Maratos, 1982;Meltzoff
and Moore, 1977, 1983, 1999). Surprisingly arbitrary forms of expression, such as
exaggerated and deliberate displays of tongue protrusion, finger extensions, mouth
opening, eye shutting and looking movements of head and eyes, are matched by
attentive newborns. They have the required intersubjective translation or "mirroring",
and an interest in making psychological contact (Meltzoff and Moore, 1997;
Trevarthen, 1998b; Trevarthen et al., 1999).
175
 The observation from a video by Saskia van Rees (van Rees and de Leeuw, loc.
cit), described and analysed by Malloch (this volume), that a two month premature
infant can engage in precise rhythmic synchrony or alternation of "coo" sounds with
an adult who is making imitative vocal responses, gives important evidence of the
precocity of human sensitivity for the beat and phrasing of expression. We know
very little about the active use of vocalisations by newborns for communication, and
there is, to my knowledge, no research to evaluate the expressive and sympathetic
behaviours of the abundant and rhythmically complex hand movements of premature
newborns, though the presence of these movements has been noted in several
descriptive accounts (Stern, 1971; Trevarthen, 1974, 1986b; Weinberg and Tronick,
1994). There is proof that the gestural movements of young infants in
protoconversations with adults are different from movements of trying to grasp
objects (Fogel and Hanan, 1985; Rönnqvist and von Hofsten, 1994).

PRIMARV INTERSUBJECTIVITY A N D T H E RHYTHMIC TURNS OF PROTOCONVERSATION

Much behaviour of a human subject is neither engaged with the "real" or objective
environment, present or remembered, nor simply concerned with self-regulation. It
is intersubjective, making signals to evoke responses in other persons (Stern, 1974;
Trevarthen, 1979, 1999; Mayer and Tronick, 1985). Infants are expressive in this
way to adults, who, responding to the infant, transmit messages extending over
tens of seconds, which engage infants closely and excite participation with the
development, climax and conclusion of each display (Stern, 1974, 1992; Stern and
Gibbon, 1980; Tronick, Als and Brazelton, 1980; Trevarthen, 1986a; Papoušek and
Papoušek, 1989; Trevarthen et al., 1999; Malloch, this volume).
Minds, for other minds, are inherently different from things, and an infant's
mind shows a given curiosity about how to communicate co-operatively in the
human way. Bråten (1992, 1998) argues, taking evidence from the earliest social
behaviours, that the intersubjective mind has to be built out of an embryonic
starting state that is dual. It has to have a "self" and a distinct "virtual other"
functional in it from the first time it communicates, the two virtual persons being
interconnected in the mind by a dynamic emotional field that is independent of
reason, and that seeks to achieve "dialogic closure" with an actual, receptive other.
Around six weeks after a baby's birth, a duetting of behaviour appears that
Bateson has named "protoconversation", because it resembles conversation between
adults (Bateson, 1971, 1979). The mother accepts the baby's voicings and gestures
as attempts to "tell her something". The timing of this face-to-face play is that of a
friendly adult chat or discussion (Stern eta/., 1977; Beebe etal., 1979,1985; Jasnow
and Feldstein, 1986). Each infant utterance, with its vocalisation, lip-and-tongue
movements and hand gestures, lasts about 2 or 3 seconds, about the time an adult
takes to say a phrase or short sentence. The individual coos last only about a third
to half a second, comparable with a syllable. Intervals between beginnings of
utterances of infant and mother indicate that they seek to join rhythms with each

176
 Musicality and the Intrinsic motive pulse
COLWYN TREVAKTH EN

other (Malloch, this volume). In early protoconversations, when the infant is six
weeks old, they set up alternation or "turn taking" on a slow adagio (one beat
in 900 milliseconds or 70lminute). Within a month or two the beat of their shared
vocal play accelerates to andante (1/700 milliseconds; 90lminute) or moderato
{1/500 milliseconds; 120/minute), but the more animated engagements are
games rather than protoconversations (Sylvester-Bradley and Trevarthen, 1978).
Microanalysis reveals how closely adult and infant are coordinated (Stern, 1971;
Fogel, 1977; Beebe, 1982; Feldstein et al., 1993; Malloch, this volume). When
attempting to synchronise their vocalisations and "fuse" on the beat each, mother or
baby, can "catch up" with the other with a lag of 120 to 250 milliseconds. The
mother catches the infant a little more quickly than the infant catches the mother,
but they are both getting on the beat in about this time. Comparison with adult
speech and other kinds of flowing expressive behaviour, including dance and music,
indicates that about 120 to 250 milliseconds is the normal duration of a wide
variety of "pre-beat" signals — the article before a noun, prefixes, an unstressed
syllable in poetry, the up-beat of a conductor's baton, etc. (See Table I). Whole
utterances in the mother's baby-talk to very young infants tend to be short (about
half to 0.75 seconds). They are repetitive and with rhythmic intonation and
undulating pitch. The regular, simplified rhythms undoubtedly help the infant to
synchronise. The range of rhythmic and prosodie features in a mother's speech
becomes much greater after the baby is three months old when it contains more
vigorous teasing and nonsensical repetitious sounds (Malloch, this volume).
In happy protoconversations the baby makes relaxed, resonant "coos", with lips
protruding like a trumpet. Coos, which are revealed by phonological analysis to be
nuclear vowel sounds, have only rudimentary articulation (Oiler and Eilers, 1992).
In alternative, unvoiced utterances the tongue and lips make many brief appositions
of differing shape. These outbursts of oral activity called "prespeech" are, like coos,
usually emphasised with a expressive hand movements or "proto-gestures" (pre hand
signs) that take a rich variety of forms (Trevarthen, 1974, 1986b). Usually lifts of
the hands and extensions or appositions of the fingers are precisely synchronised
with or rhythmically linked to coos or prespeech. Repetitive babbling does not come
until the baby is about 6 months old, and this kind of vocalisation is often a kind of
self-stimulating game, babies often babbling to themselves at play, or while lying in
the cot after sleeping (Oiler and Eilers, 1992; Locke, 1993, 1995).
Protoconversation between infants and their caretakers has, then, invariant
features which reflect; (a) coordination between the various channels of expression
and modalities of awareness of the infant, who can behave as a coherent and fluent
expressive actor, and (b) a mutual comprehension or empathy by means of which
infant and partner improvise an integrated and patterned engagement or performance.
Different qualities of engagement are determined by a shared spectrum of emotions
which gain organisation between them by their mutual influence on each other
in the communications. Homologous emotions in infant and caretaker generate

177
harmony, sympathy, support, comfort, restraint or antagonism. As the baby develops
through the first 6 months, the emotions become strung together in increasingly
impassioned plots, in which protagonists play expressive parts to each other. Stern
describes "feeling qualities" transmitted in time with distinctive "activation
contours", which he says are, "captured by such kinetic terms as "crescendo,"
"decrescendo," "fading", "exploding," "bursting," "elongated," "fleeting," "pulsing,"
"wavering," "effortful," "easy, " and so on," (Stern, 1993, p. 206). These give forms
of vitality to all the emotions expressed.

"INTUITIVE MOTHERESE" MATCHES INFANTILE MUSICALITY

The "intuitive parenting" behaviour of a father or mother at play with an infant, or
when they are trying to regulate, calm or arouse the infant, shows that the adult is
both sensitive to the infants emotion and unconsciously skilled in giving the right
level of emotionally-coloured contingent responses (Stern, 1971, 1974; Papoušek
and Papoušek, 1987; Stern, 1992; Papoušek and Bornstein, 1992; Trevarthen,
1993a; Papoušek, M., 1996; Stern, 1999). There is a fine sensitivity for the Intrinsic
Motive Pulse and the matching emotions that infant and adult share.
"Infant-directed speech" or "motherese" is simpler in content and syntax
compared to speech between adults — its main feature is its prosody or song. Short
often repeated utterances with distinctive pitch contours are made with a clear central
beat between adagio and andante with measured rubato. Papoušek and Papoušek
(1981), referring to the infant's matching contribution, called these musical elements
as opposed to the "supra-segmental" or "paralinguistic" elements of linguists. A few
simple contours are produced many times with different lexical content. Often the
speech turns into wordless song or nonsense sounds, but it is always rhythmic and
sonorous. As Fernald supposes, the "melody is the message" (1989). Mandarin
Chinese and American English mothers speak in closely matching "intuitive motherese"
even though Chinese is a tonal language and English is not (Grieser and Kuhl,
1988). Conventional inflexional and articulatory differences between the languages
are suspended as mothers repeat short, evenly-spaced words with simple, sing-song
intonations in a resonant yet relaxed and "breathy", moderately high-pitched voice.
So, while a newborn can show a learned preference for the prosody of the "mother
tongue", and can even show a preference for the mother herself as a speaker of
motherese in that language (De Casper and Fifer, 1980; DeCasper and Spence,
1986; Fifer and Moon, 1995), the infant's awareness is also seeking regularities
common to an affectionate register of speech in all languages.
Mother and infant are highly cooperative in creating the turn-taking of vocalisations
and visible and tangible expressions, like experienced musicians and dancers improvising.

T H E MUSICAL PERCEPTIVENESS OF T H E INFANT LISTENER

Laboratory experiments have proved that, by the middle of the first year at least,
infants are discriminating listeners. They hear musical parameters well (Demany,
1982; Trehub, 1987, Trehub et al, 1993; Zentner et al., 1996), and they show
preferences for these same parameters in the vocal productions of mothers
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 Musicality and the Intrinsic motive p u l s e
COLWYN TREVAKTH EN

25
(DeCasper and Fifer, 1980; Trehub, 1990; Fassbender, 1996; Papoušek, 1994,
1996). It seems that the infants* acute ability to hear musical elements in a mother's
voice is important for "state regulation" by the mother's sympathetic response to the
infant's expressions of arousal, fretfulness, tiredness, playfulness, joy, etc. (Papoušek
and Papoušek, 1981). It is clear, however, that the infant is not just responding to
the mothers signals with a reflex state change. The kind of speech or song a mother
uses is very much a response to the rhythms and emotional quality of the infant's
expressions. The success of motherese or a mothers singing depends on a co-
construction of a joint, two-way "performance". The mother is "attuning" to
musicality in the infants manifestations of purposefulness, alertness and emotion —
she is communicating with the infant (Jones, 1990; Papoušek, M., 1994, 1996;
Papoušek and Papoušek, 1981, 1987, 1989; Stern et al., 1985; Stern, 1993, 1999).
Infants hear music in the human voice, in instrumental playing or in the artificial
tones and groups of tone presented to them in the laboratory-—-they detect motive
impulses in the movements (or electronic simulations of movements) that generate
the sounds. Even the preferences for classical tonality and sensitivity for timbrai
differences can be interpreted as data about the energy or emotional effort and
"purity" of control in the human voice or in other human action. Infants are listening
for the psychological energy of the IMP. Observation of infants listening to and
moving with mothers singing and dancing movements, or to recorded music, shows
that from the earliest months the babies are seeking to become physically involved
in the expressive message — to dance with the melodic narrative12.
By recording changes in their heart beat with attention to novel events, where
they chose to look, or by causing their head rotations, leg movements or sucking to
trigger stimuli, it has been possible to show that infants, even newborns, are
extremely sensitive to expressions of emotion in body movements and touching,
voice, or facial movements (Lipsett, 1967; Papoušek, 1967; Eisenberg, 1975;
DeCasper and Carstens, 1981; Bower, 1982; Jusczyk, 1985).
Orienting of the baby's head towards a loudspeaker that is presenting a change
in sound patterns has been used by a number of researchers to show that subjects

(12) In the past 25 years, research has transformed psychologists' appreciation of what infants can
perceive and do with physical stimuli, objects and events, especially visually perceived events. Now
the abilities of infants to perceive, react to and influence the behaviours of human partners in live
communication are receiving more attention, though interpretations of the evidence are diverse
and often incompatible, some defending the conservative rationalistic view that the innate
endowments are in the nature of general cognitive abilities, or a few special purpose "modular"
mechanisms for perceptually detecting other subjects. It is widely assumed that the young infant
has not yet constructed a coherent "self", and, therefore, cannot sustain awareness of contingent
reactions of persons to the infant's actions (e.g. Rochat, 1999). Obviously, the initial state of
the infant mind presents serious theoretical challenges for the dominant paradigm in psychology.
A prime source of confusion is due to the tendency to overlook "brain time" and the intrinsic
rhythmicality of purposes as a fundamental, and innate, coordinating principle for cognitive
processes and their development.
over 6 months old, that is infants who are already beginning to play with voice
sounds and who imitate some adult vocalisations, can discriminate melodic patterns
independent of pitch, and melodic contours with variation of intervals (Chang and
Trehub, 1977a; Trehub, Bull and Thorpe, 1984;Trehub, Thorpe and Morrongiello,
1985, 1987; for a synthesis, see Trehub, Schellenberg and Hill, 1997). Trehub
(1990) concludes that, "infants' representation of melodies is abstract and adult-
like" (Trehub, loc. cit., p. 437). It has been shown that infants can distinguish rise
and fall in pairs of notes separated by as little as one semi-tone, and, in a test for
awareness of a change from a standard sequence of notes, they can recall a melody
based on the tones of the major triad better than one that is atonal. Apparently
"good" melodic, rhythmic or linguistic patterns are better standards for perceptual
comparison for infants, as they are for adults. Other tests have demonstrated that
infants are sensitive to differences in tempo, that they can discriminate rhythmic
sequences independent of tempo (Trehub and Thorpe, 1989), and that they experience
Gestalt "grouping" effects like adults (Chang and Trehub, 1977b; Demany, 1982;
Demany, McKenzie and Vurpillot, 1977; Fassbender, 1993; Mélen, 1999a and b;
Thorpe and Trehub, 1989; Thorpe, Trehub, Morrongiello and Bull, 1988). Moreover
it has been demonstrated that infants respond to fundamental pitch independent of
tonal composition (Clarkson and Clifton, 1985). They perceive differences in timbre
of non-speech tones (Clarkson, Clifton and Perris, 1988), and are even able to
categorise them (Clarkson et al., 1988; Trehub, Endman and Thorpe, 1990).
Finally, it appears they can discriminate differences in timbre of the kind that
differentiate between vowels [a] and [i], in spite of variations in fundamental
frequency, duration and intensity (see, e.g., Kuhl, 1985).
Trehubs psychophysical tests did not consciously use stimuli that imitate the
behaviours of adults addressing infants, but she did select appropriate groups of
sounds. She argues from her observations on human voices that, "the design features
of infant music should embody pitch levels in the vicinity of the octave beginning
with middle C (262 Hz), simple contours that are unidirectional or that have few
changes in pitch direction {e.g., rise-fall), slow tempos (approximately 2.5 noteslsec),
and simple rhythms" (Trehub, 1990, p. 443). These predictions match well the
vocal patterns infants produce in song-like play, the prosodie patterns parents use to
excite or calm their infants, and the songs that adults sing to infants (Papoušek and
Papoušek, 1981; Stern et al., 1977, 1983, 1985; Fernald, 1992; Papoušek, H., 1996;
Papoušek, M., 1996; Trainor, 1996; Trehub, Schellenberg and Hill, 1997; Trehub,
Unyk etal., 1997; Trainor and Zacharias, 1998; Stern, 1999).

D A N C I N G TO BABY S O N G S : A CHALLENGE FOR PSYCHOLOGY

We have learned much about what infants want from company by analysing what
people do to entertain them, and how it changes. Musical play, including traditional
baby songs and invented vocal glosses in games or nonsense chants, spontaneously

180
 Musicality and the Intrinsic motive p u l s e
COLWYN TREVAKTH EN

Figure 7. "Rock-a-bye Baby".

emerges as a favourite way parents everywhere entertain with infants in a "period of

games" a few months after birth (Trevarthen and Hubley, 1978; Trcvarthen, 1986a;
Trevarthen and Marwick, 1986; Trevarthen et al., 1999). Infants soon play with
their growing abilities for communication for their own amusement, too,
"reflectively" and "experimentally". When, around 6 months, they are beginning to
have the power and control of vocal expression that can start to imitate speech, they
enjoy repeating voice sounds in musical forms (Stern et a/., 1975; Papoušek and

181
Papoušek, 1981; Stern et ai, 1983; Trevarthen and Marwick, 1986; Papoušek, M.,
1992; Trevarthen et ai, 1999). They are also becoming self-conscious when
observed, and they "show off" learned routines and comical expressions and
behaviours. Soon jokes and tricks, including musical ones, become a part of play
with the family (Trevarthen, 1990, 1998b; Reddy, 1991).
Infants learn games and playful rituals quickly, including both baby songs and
similar nonsense chants, which are often accompanied by body games, as in bouncing,
clapping and tickling songs. These are typically composed of groups of stanzas or
verses that each last 15-30 seconds. Mothers often make rhythmic displays of hand
movements while they sing to the baby. Infants soon join in parents' musical and
dance-like games with rhythmic bouncing of their own body, flapping or banging
movements of the arms and hands, kicking and a variety of vocal productions.
When they respond in this way infants show emotions of intense and sustained
fascination with joyful recognition of significant changes.

ILLUSTRATING RHYTHM, QUALITY AND NARRATIVE IN SOUNDS OF BABY SONGS:

ESSENTIAL PIECES OF THE PUZZLE
Figures 1 and 2 record the voice of a young woman as she sings two traditional
English nursery songs13. These are typical of the songs mothers sing to babies and
young children. An acoustic analysis shows the complexity of their timing and the
systematic expressive use of pitch and timbre.
The spectrographs reveal the rhythmic elements and show extended vowel
sounds, which are concentrated near the ends of the phrases, and especially at the
end of the lines. The text spells out the alliterations and rhymes that give force to
the melody. The vowels form patterns in time, which, spoken alone, would seem to
convey a narrative. Pitch plots, made by Malloch's procedure (this volume), dearly
demonstrate the narrative line of the song, as Malloch has discussed (lor. cit.).
Table II presents information on the timing of the singer's movements as these
are carried by her voice. She adopts a moderato beat for both songs and the tempo is
modulated with the pitch to "fall" quickly with the cradle, and to slowly "climb the
hill". "Jack and Jill" is a lively action song with bouncing, insistent and compelling
iambic metre. "Rock a bye baby" is a lullaby that has a gentle rocking or swaying
dactylic metre. It is interesting that the vibrato also varies with the emotion; it is fast
as the excitment increases "when the wind blows" and in "down will come baby", as
well as when "Jill comes tumbling after" and Jack's is trotting "as fast as he could
caper", but slow as Jack and Jill climb the hill, and again at the close of both songs.
This signal of tension fits with the pitch level as an emotional signal. In the same

(13) For these songs I thank Caroline Howell, who sang them, and Stephen Malloch who made the
spectrographs and pitch plots using the methods he has described (Malloch et al., 1997; Malloch, this
volume).

182
Figure 2. "Jack and Jill Went Up the Hill".
 Table II
English Nursery Songs

ROCK-A-BYE BABY TIMES

Seconds Milliseconds
Line Phrases A v . Bar Av. Beat Vibrato Vibrato
2 in line = line/4 = line/12 av. of 10 in Bar
1. Rock-a-bye baby, / on the tree top. 6.77 3.43 3.33 1,691 564
2. W h e n the w i n d blows, the /cradle will rock. 7.23 3.53 3.70 1,808 603 158 11.79
3. When the b o u g h breaks, the /cradle will fall. 7.21 3.53 3.68 1,802 601 176 9.75
4. Down will come baby, ! cradle, and all. 6.81 3.38 3.43 1,704 568 132.205 12.25.9.08

TOTAL 28.02
MEANS 7.00 3.50 1,751 584 168 10.42

JACK A N D JILL TIMES

Seconds Milliseconds
Line Phrases Av. Bar Av. Beat Vibrato
2 in line = line/4 = line/8 av. of 10
1. Jack and Jill w e n t u p the hill, to /fetch a pail of water, 4.50 2.26 2.25 1,126 562 193
2. Jack fell d o w n , and broke his crown, and /Jill came tumbling after. 4.47 2.23 2.24 1,118 559 165
3. U p Jack got and off he trott, as / f a s t as he could caper. 4.31 2.16 2.16 951 475 174
4. Went to b e d to m e n d his head, with /vinegar and brown paper. 4.76 2.09 2.66 1,189 595 184

TOTAL 18.04
MEANS 4.51 2.26 1,096 548
 M u s i c a l i t y a n d t h e Intrinsic m o t i v e p u l s e
COLWYN TREVAKTH EN

Figure 3. A mother sings to her blind 5-month-old daughter.

The axes mark the vertical and horizontal dimensions in which displacements of the finger, wrist
and elbow of the left limb of the infant are plotted in Figure 7.

way the vibrato in "Rock-a-bye baby" with three utterances of the word "cradle"
appears to change with the tempo 14 .

(14) The following definitions are given in The Shorter Oxford English Dictionary.
"Stanza": A group of lines of verse (usually not less than 4), arranged according to a definite
scheme which regulates the number of lines, the metre, and (in rhymed poetry) the sequence of
rhymes; normally forming a division of a song or poem consisting of a series of such groups
constructed according to the same scheme. Also, any of the particular types of structure according
to which the stanzas are framed,
"Foot": A division of verse, consisting of a number of syllables one of which has the tense or
principle stress. It refers to the movement of the foot in beating time.
"Metre": Any form of poetic rhythm, its kind being determined by the character and number of
the feet or groups of syllables of which it consists.
"Iambus": A metrical foot consisting of a short followed by a long syllable; in accentual verse, of
an unaccented followed by an accented syllable.
"Dactyl": A foot of three syllables, one long followed by three short (like the joints of a finger).
"Vibrato": A tremulous or vibrating effect in the human voice in singing, "especially to express
intensity of emotion".

185
ÏNTERMODAL AND MOTOR EQUIVALENCE OF THE DEEP NARRATIVE IMPULSE: A BLIND
INFANT'S GESTURED PARTICIPATION IN THE MUSICALITY OF A MOTHER'S SONGS
Evidence for the central role of a general intuitive or innate motive process in
communicative rhythmicity comes from the observation of a total transmodal, or
submodal, unity of expression and experience in a baby's listening.
In human conversational expression the generation of vocal signals, gestures of
the arms and hands, movements of legs and feet, and postural changes of the whole
body links all these movements in precise synchrony or successive sympathetic co-
ordination. Intrinsic co-ordination, or "orchestration", of expressive acts also
provides immediate perceptual equivalence for audible, tangible and visible signals
that carry the messages. All of these activities and sensibilities can be coordinated
within one expressing subject, or shared in synchrony between subjects in pairs or
larger groups.
Infants show this "intermodal fluency" (Stern et ai, 1985). Temporal self-
synchrony and inter-synchrony with another person may both be evident from
birth. The common core process is based on the specified hierarchy of brain-
generated rhythms, as we have described, and a principle of variable "tension" or
"intensity" that determines dynamic affective contours and "impact" of change in
expression.
A video document made by Dr. Gunilla Preisler of the Department of
Psychology, Stockholm University gives evidence of the intrinsic brain processes that
animate an infant's listening to a mother's song, and this will serve well to show the
IMP of musicality that underlies both the performance and the appreciation of a
simple but very affecting musical composition, beautifully performed 15 . The unity
of motive changes in a musical narrative and their transmission by vocal or gestural
means is vividly demonstrated by the analysis of this Swedish mother singing to her
5-month-oId daughter with the daughter's gestural accompaniment. The infant is
lying on her back on a mattress while the mother is bottle-feeding her and singing
(Figure 3). Their delicate and subtle duetting is made even more instructive by the
fact that this infant was born totally and permanently blind. She has never seen
her hands or the hands of any other person. And yet it appears she can accompany
portions of the song her mother sings (Figures 4 to 6) with expressive hand gestures
that display intelligent precision and even some anticipation of the melody. Over the
past months the baby girl has become very familiar with these compositions by Alice
Tegnér (Alfons, 1988), whose children's songs are much loved throughout
Scandinavia.
Each song sketches a complete narrative (Figures 5 and 6; Table III). The
"Squirrel" song is composed of one 4-phrase stanza and one with 3 phrases. "Little

(15) I am indebted to Dr. Gunilla Preisler, of the Department of Psychology, Stockholm University,
for permission to analyse the mother's singing and the infant's responses. The recording was made
in the course of Dr. Preisler's work with blind infants (Preisler and Palmer, 1986). Alice Tegnér's
songs are published in a Swedish songbook for children (Alfons, 1988).

186
 Ekorr'n satt i granen

Mors lilla Olle

Figure 4. Swedish baby songs, * Ekorr'n satt i granen' and "Mors lil-la Ol-le".

Olle" has 4 stanza, each of 4 phrases which together tell an exciting story. The infant,
oblivious to the meaning of the words, "acts" portions of the "melodrama" of each
story in a stunningly appropriate way. Table 4 summarises the intricate timing of the
elements of the mothers performance, and the different rhythmic levels.

187
Figure 6. "Mors lit-la Ol-le".
 The infant is moving both hands, touching her clothes or the bottle, and moving
them about in the air. The left hand is more active, and at several points in both
songs, she makes with it intricate and delicate gestures that match variations of both
the pulse and melodic line with appropriate forms of arm waving and extensions and
turns of the fingers. The plots of displacement of the left arm, shown in Figure 7,
and the drawings of her hand positions, give an incomplete representation of
episodes of movement with which she "conducted" her mothers singing with an
astonishing subtlety and precision. Her gesturing is recounting the message in non-
verbal mimesis. She is dancing dramatic moments and the progress of the adventure
in these little "myths". We see that she does so with the "right" moves, even as a
trained conductor might. She accentuates the flow of feeling in the "story", pointing
up high notes, spreading to the side to follow the surges of energy, closing her fingers
and/or dropping her hand eloquently at the close of a phrase. Her sense of pitch
space seem to be aligned with the axis of her body while she lies on her back, higher
pitch being accompanied by a move headwards, lowest pitch being below the waist.
Even more remarkably, her gestures occasionally anticipate the mothers melodic and
rhythmic change by a fraction of a second. It is clear that the infant is recognising
the songs and performing them, at least partly, from memory — immediately after
the start of the second song the infant stirs and smiles in recognition, and both
mother and baby chuckle.
I draw a number of conclusions from this document. First it is clear that
mother and infant are, at one level, equally competent (and confident) performers,
and that the infant is deeply attentive and perceptive of subtle musical features of
the singing, which are not fully represented in either printed version, poem or score.
Nor is the mother's song accurately rendered by the musical score, although she sings
well and is faithful to the intended music. She speaks a proficient and correct
Swedish, but it is the rhythm and melody of her expression rather than the words
that are carrying the message to her baby16. The spectrograph shows subtleties of
"interpretation" that are missing from either the musical notation or the written text
of the poems' 7 . I submit that the mother is not "interpreting" a score or the text at
all. Rather, she is bringing to life, from her memory and imagination, the melody
that Tegnér so brilliantly composed in written poetry and in notation to convey an
infectious musicality. Tegnér herself will have been listening to a "muse" or imagined
source of melodic motivation and narrative feeling that she knew would appeal to
children, as well as to their parents and teachers. It is highly significant that such a
song, once attended to with appreciation, is virtually unforgettable as pure music,

(16) For the transcription of the mother's singing, and the literal translation into English, 1 thank
Monica Hedenbro and Annette Lidén.
(17) The quality of the VHS video sound in this recording does not permit pitch plots, and the
spectrographs include sounds of movement of the infants clothes and of sucking and laughter.
Nevertheless, the melodic line and timing of the mother's song are clear.

190
 M u s i c a l i t y and t h e Intrinsic m o t i v e p u l s e
COLWYN TREVAKTH EN

Table III
Timing of Swedish baby s o n g s

"Ekorr'n satt i granen"

TIMES IN MILLISECONDS Line Beat Av. Musical Syllables Syllables

Beat Bar In Bar Av.; Max.; Min.
1 Ekorr'n /satt i / g r a / n e n , / / 4,950 1,250/1,200/1,150/1,350// 1,238 4,950 6 825; 1,200; 200
2 skulle/skala / k o t / t a r , / / 4,800 1,350/1,050/1,250/1,350// 1,200 4,800 6 800; 1,250; 250
3 fick han /höra / b a r / n e n , / / 4730 1,050/1,300/1,350/1,250// 1,383 4,730 6 788; 1,350; 300
4 då fick /han så / b r i t / t o m . / / 5,300 1,300/1,350/1,450/1,300// 1,375 S,300 6 917; 1,450; 300

5 Hoppa'/han på / t a l l e / g r e n , / / 4,750 1,250/1,200/950/1,350// 1,388 4,750 7 679; 1,350; 550

6 stötte /hansitt /lilla / b e n 4 / 5 0 1,000/1,000/1,100/1,350/ 1,063 5,200 9 578; 1,350; 450
7 och den / / U n g a /ludna /svansen. 5,650 550/ /1,000/1,800/2,300 1513 5,300 6 850; 1,800; 250

TOTAL 3S,030
(verse 1: 19,980,
verse 2:15,050)
MEANS 5,006 1,251 5,006

Literal English translation

The squirrel sat in the fir tree. Jumping on a pine branch,
going to peel the cone, he hit his little leg
then he heard the children, and the long furry tail
and he got in a hurry.

"Mora lille Olle"

Swedish English (Literal translation) Line Verse Av. Beat

seconds seconds msec.
1 Mors Ulla Olle i skogen gick, Mother's little Olle went in the wood. 7.1 688
2 rosor p i kind och solsken 1 blick. Rosy on the cheek and sunshine in glance 7.3 886
3 Läpparna små utav bär i r o blå. Little lips from berries blue. 6.7 640
4 "Bara jag slapp att så ensam här gå!" 'If only 1 didn't have to ga alone here!" 7.8 28.9 957

5 Brummellibrum, vem lufsar där? Brummelibrum, w h o ii pacing here? 7.3 900

6 Buskarna knaka. En hund visst det är. The bushes cracking. A dog is surely there. 7.6 914
7 Lurvig är pälsen Men Olle blir glad: Furry b the coat But Olle becomes glad: 7.2 680
8 "A, en kamrat, det var bra, se goddag!" "Oh a friend, that was good, good-dayt" 7.4 29,3 929

9 Klappa så björnen med hinder små, Stroking the bear with hands small 7.7 938
10 räcker fram korgen: "Se där, smaka på!" Offering him the basket: "Look , taste it!" 7.2 957
11 Nalle han slukar mest allt vad där än Teddy gobbles almost all that is there: 7J 900
12 "Hor du, jag tror, att du tycker om bär!" "Listen, I think that you like berries!" 7J 29,3 929

13 Mor fick nu l e dem, gav till ett skri Mother now tees them, gave out a scream. 7.6 950
14 Björnen sprang bort, nu är leken förbi! The bear ran away, now the game is ovrr! 7.4 914
15 "Å, varför skrämde du u n d a n min vän? "Oh, why did you frighten away my friend? 8,3 990
16 Mor lilla, bed honom komma igen!" Mother dear, ask him to come back again!" 8.8 31.9 1086

TOTAL 119.8
MEANS 7.49 29.95 929
Mean Phrase (1/2 line) 3.74

and that the music makes the words of an appealing narrative both richer and more
memorable. The link between melody and memory must explain one key function
of musicality, or poetics — they make sharable and retrievable meanings.
How are we to account for this infants ability? Is it likely that she has learned
some special trick, or that she is a freak of nature? She certainly could not learn or
imitate how to make the appropriate gestures by seeing hands. She appears to just
"know", much like a newborn "knows" how to smile pleasure or pout distress. This
particular infant's sensitivity to her mother's voice and her song may well be

191
 Figure 7. Blind Swedish baby: hand movements and mother's singing.
Lines 3 and 4 of "Ekorr'n satt i granen". The plots of displacement for the tip of the index finger, wrist and elbow of the infant's left hand were made from
the video, at 0.2 second intervals, with "NIH Image 1.60/ppc" software. The sketches of hand movements, traced from the video, give an indication of the
rich gestural expression. Dotted vertical lines mark the half-phrases or bars of the mother's singing. At the close of phrases, on the rhyming syllables "-gren"
and "ben" (A, B), and the two syllables "svan ...sen" at the end of the song (C, D), the infant drops or closes her hand. At "stöt-te", the beginning of the
second phrase, she flourishes her hand towards her head and extends all her fingers. The "pincer" pose at B, synchronous with "ben", marks the climax of
these two final lines of the song.
 M u s i c a l i t y a n d t h e Intrinsic m o t i v e p u l s e
COLWYN TREVAKTH EN

enhanced by the fact that she is blind, and it is probably important that her mother
has been encouraged to communicate with her with voice and touch. There is other
evidence that the gestures of blind babies are particularly expressive (Fraiberg,
1979). However, the mother was not aware of her daughter's "musical" gestures.
In fact, this sympathy of hand gestures for the melody of speech or song is not a
rare skill in infants. "Intersynchrony" between a newborn's hand movements and the
syllables of adult speech, first reported by Condon and Sander (1974), is common.
I find that in the films I have of babies from a few weeks old to one year attending
to speech and song in many different languages there are frequent cases where subtle
gestures are made in spontaneous synchrony with rhythmic elements of the vocal or
instrumental sounds the babies are hearing. It is our loss that we know so little about
the generation and regulation of this remarkable natural behaviour.
Finally, this behaviour of a young baby is far beyond that any other species of
animal can achieve — in its intricacy, narrative cohesion, flexibility, and in its
meaning. The performance of mother and baby is both a piece of Swedish culture,
and a work of art with fascinating appeal for any attentive viewer. It is obvious that
the infant's ability at 5 months to attend to two songs in succession, which lasted
38 seconds, and 112 seconds, respectively, and to become involved so intensely and
so cleverly in the articulated sounds of her mother's voice has significance for
language acquisition. There is elaborate, well-organised narrative syntax here, and
the mother's Swedish is clearly pronounced, giving excellent exposure to the
characteristically rich vowels, which stand out in the spectrographs, especially at the
ends of phrases. The rhyming phonemes seem to tell the story all on their own!
Interest in the narrative experience and its communication is a human trait.
We know that, if she develops normally, the baby will be likely, within a few
weeks, to show evidence in vocalisations of identification with the phonology of this
particular "mother tongue", although it has to be admitted that she may have a
handicap in that she cannot match the sight of her mother's oral articulations with
the sounds that accompany them. On the other hand, her cortical auditory system
is probably hypertrophied at the expense of visual circuits, and she may be more
acute in her discrimination of the interpersonal messages of speech than most
infants her age would be.
What does this blind infant teach us? That humans are born with an intrinsic
sense of behavioural and experiential time adapted for sympathetic motivation
in imagination, for "mirroring" or "echoing" the motives in another's song. This
would appear to be a fundamental aptitude integrating both action and consciousness,
and leading to thought and language, as well as what is currently called "executive
functioning" and "working memory". This might be more appropriately seen as a
"narrative" functioning, which is concerned with imagination and its intersubjective
transmission as much as with a single subjects cognitive execution, perceptual
learning and problem solving.

193
 INFANT MUSICALITY AND THE SHARING OF BOTH FEELING AND MEANING

It is clear that infants are responsive to the musicality of maternal expression as part
of their elaborate adaptations to co-operate with and benefit from the strong
messages of care, concern and love that a mother presents. The Papoušeks, who have
done much to reveal the nature of innate human musical skills, conclude that
the mothers "intuitive parenting" is the essential external stimulus to the child's
investigative motivation and cognitive development, as well as being the regulator of
inner states of arousal and physiological maintenance (Papoušek and Papoušek,
1977, 1981, 1987). Non-verbal patterns of protoconversations and games with
infants, which prove the shared sense of time between adult and infant, clearly serve
in cultural learning and, specifically, in the creative awareness and learning of
natural, conversational language (Papoušek and Papoušek, 1989). Daniel Stern has
pioneered a theory of the infants dynamic emotions, and how the mother helps
develop these into narratives of the experiencing self, giving the infant confirmation
of consciousness and the will to live by reflecting, or, as he puts it, "attuning to" the
inner transmodal impulses of moving and noticing (Stern, 1985,1990,1993,1999;
Stern et al., 1985). This is both a theory of the development of self-awareness, and
a formula for sensitive therapeutic practices that may support to development an
emotional health without verbal or cold-reasoned interpretation. Stern tends to
interpret the mother's joy-sharing role as arousing and constructive of the infants
self-awareness. However, the infant takes the role of an active and creative partner
from the beginning, often inventing attunements to what the parent does (Reddy,
1991).
The learning function of a child's personal "attachment" relationships and their
emotional basis is made clear by the way children use their communication to open
or close channels for sharing of games, joint experiences and cooperative tasks with
different individuals. The making and keeping of friends in the family, as well as the
suspicious withdrawing from strangers ("unfamiliar" persons) is all part of the
machinery of motives that helps a baby pick up and practice knowledge of the
fabric of meanings in the home's "mini-culture" (Halliday, 1975; Trevarthen, 1984c,
1993a, 1990, 1998a; Reddy et ai, 1997). Friendships continue to play a crucial
role in the setting up and growth of peer play, in which so much of culture's wisdom
is assimilated from the society outside the family both before and after formal
schooling begins.
Thus, musicality is a part of the natural drive in human socio-cultural learning,
which begins in infancy. Toddlers and pre-school children often create and share
musical games — the "children's musical culture" (Bjorkvold, loc. cit). Clearly musical
communication develops in parallel with language. Together they constitute a
fundamental part of the human evolutionary endowment for cognitive growth in
culture, as has been argued by the Papoušeks (Papoušek and Papoušek, 1981;
Papoušek, M., 1994; Papoušek, H., 1996), Cross (1999) and Dissanayake (1999).
Musicality is fundamental to the effective communication of a teacher, and there
194
 Musicality and the Intrinsic motive pulse
COLWYN TREVAKTH EN

is a rhythmic coherence to enlivening and "collaborative learning" in classroom

discussions with young children (Erikson, 1996; Rogoff, 1998), The essential
intersubjectivity of teaching (Bruner, 1996) pays respect for the rhythms of dialogue.
Motives for learning and using all cultural signs in human society are animated
by the emotions with which people support their meanings (Rommetveit, 1998),
Signs gain value from emotions. Meanings are defined in dynamic relationships
between persons, and emotions create, keep open or close, give narrative form to and
associate those interpersonal relations. The arbitrary significance of a symbol, giving
it free application to nature and reality, requires that minds will negotiate and make
some measure of agreement about how to represent the fact-related but imaginary
story they want to share (Trevarthen and Logotheti, 1987; Trevarthen, 1994). All
such acts of cooperation in getting at meanings require genuine human
understanding and confluence of emotional activity — they require relationships of
trust, admiration, respect or obedience, and so forth. In a word, they require a
responsive empathy of the kind that music exercises and celebrates. It is difficult
to identify the "meaning" of a piece of music, but it is obvious that music can be
meaningful (Pavlicevic, 1997). This conundrum is resolved by identifying music not
with the thing referred to, but with the motive that seeks or makes meaning.
A child is a symbol-needing creature, adapted to understand the shared fantasies
that make up human consciousness, possessing rudimentary innate principles of
aesthetics, morality, humour and co-operaciveness. These motives and their "dynamic
affects" are seen in the early appearance of musical dramatics in games that infants
play with their companions. Musicality is not only a key part of the general amodal
dynamics of the human mind, integrating different modes of thought (Cross, 1999),
it is the foundation for sympathetic relationships in which the human sense of the
world is created.
Infants and most mothers are not musicians. What they produce together is not
music. And yet they demonstrate both appreciation for elements and forms of music
and song, and an ability to express themselves with musicality. These appear as
attributes of a fundamental motivation for sharing consciousness in "live company",
which scientific psychology struggles to understand. A musical approach can help us
obtain a rich and accurate account of how momentary emotions are communicated
with infants, how they are transformed into "emotional narratives" in which
meaningful memories can crystallised, and how these "narratives" contribute to the
development of structures in language and thought.

L O S I N G AND R E S T O R I N G T H E BEAT O F SYMPATHETIC C O M M U N I C A T I O N

Experiments in which brief impediments are introduced to mother-infant play,

breaking the rhythm and sympathy of two-way emotional contact between mother
and baby, bring to light the motive forces that regulate engagements that bring
pleasure. For example, if the mother holds herself still and unrcactive, this non-

195
responsiveness, causing the infant to experience her behaviour as random or "non-
contingent", leads the baby to become unhappy and watchful, then withdrawn and
distressed (Tronick et ai, 1978; Murray and Trevarthen, 1985). The expressions
quickly become sad or angry, indicating that the emotions of the infant are adapt-
ing defensively in an organised way to signal depression or protest; what happens is
not chaotic or uninterpretable. Movements of the infants body make clear and dis-
tinct messages that, in turn, instantly elicit strong feelings of concern, unhappiness
and anxiety in the watching but inactive mother — if she has the healthy level of
sympathy for her infant (Gratier, this volume; Robb, this volume).
Another experiment depends upon the establishment of close and affectionate
protoconversational interaction between mother and baby by a two-way video-audio
link. A similar organised pattern of avoidance and distress to that following the
mothers "still face" behaviour occurs when the baby is presented with a replay of the
video record of the mother taken during a happy and lively protoconversation that
has been mediated a few minutes before through the Double Video (DTV) system
(Murray and Trevarthen, 1985; Nadel et ai, 1999). In this situation, the replayed
images of the mother's smiling, laughter and motherese talk fail, except by chance,
to be in rhythm with (normally "contingent" upon) what the baby does. The baby
interacting by tentative smiles, coos and gestures of the hands with the unresponsive
physical recording, which is apparently happy but acting "out of time", loses
anticipatory control of the contact and behaves as if distressed by the image of the
"senselessly" chatting mother, and even fearful of her. This test proves that it is the
precise interplay of address and reply in shared time that keeps the mutual happy
engagement going 18 .

(18) A recent experimental study, motivated by the theory that an infant has to "construct" from
experience an awareness of the body, a "self-image", by learning to recognise the reafferent
sensations that are totally contingent on any movement initiated by the infant, has claimed that the
Double TV Replay test, does not (cannot?) show evidence of disturbance in the infant's behaviour
before about 3 months by non-contingent behaviour of a partner (Rochat eí al., 1998).
Nevertheless, the findings of Murray and Trevarthen (1985) that two months olds are
immediately affected by the unpredictable reactions of the replayed image of the mother have been
replicated (Nadel et al., 1999). It would appear that the constructivist view, based on evidence from
experimental studies of infants preferential looking and visually elicited manual activity, is too
swayed by the conspicuous changes in visual alertness and discrimination that follow early
maturation of the visual system. Development of visuo-spatial control is confused with acquisition
of core regulation in all modalities — a mistake Piaget made in his account of the development of
eye-hand coordination by reflex assembly, which overlooked neonatal prereaching (Piaget, 1953).
In fact, there is much evidence from the imitative behaviours and other dialogic interactions with
newborns, especially in relation to touch and vocal stimulation from another person, that infants
are born with prospective regulation of a moving "self-image", as well as certain precise
anticipations of the sympathetic effects of another person acting in response to the infant's
expressive movements — anticipations that constitute Brâten's "virtual other" (Bråten, loc cit). In

196
 Musicality and the Intrinsic motive pulse
COLWYN TREVAKTH EN

Conversely, one can study what happens when the baby is prevented from being
expressive in an appropriately responsive way "in time" with the mothers feelings.
When a video recording of the baby's part in a live protoconversation by DTV is
replayed to the mother, she feels something is wrong, but usually does not realise the
actual cause. All indices of her affectionate identification with her infant go down
and she speaks as if the infant is a "thing", or projects her unsettled feelings onto the
infant (Murray and Trevarthen, 1986). Mother and baby must perceive each other
as making a live response in rhythmic sympathy for them to be at ease and
communicative. Both are trying to predict the course of their interaction, anticipating
satisfaction and pleasurable continuation. To do this they must share the pattern of
time generated in their movements — their IMPs must be synchronised.
These findings confirm the importance of innate emotional dynamics and
Coordinated Interpersonal Timing (CIT) for regulating interpersonal contacts by
"feed forward", and they have important clinical implications (Beebe et al., 1985;
Jaffe et al., 1999). They help us to understand why mothers who are depressed and
unable to mirror their infants' feelings lose musicality and cannot communicate
with their infants and make them happy, or sympathise appropriately when they
are distressed (see Robb, this volume, and Grauer, this volume); why the infants of
depressed mothers fail to thrive and cease to develop cognitively (Murray et ai,
1996), and why a mother with normal capacities for affectionate care of her baby
has trouble if her baby is abnormal in emotional response or expression (Aitken and
Trevarthen, 1997). The findings confirm the evidence from infants' spontaneous
responses to mothers' spcech and song and to rhythmic expressive behaviours of all
kinds. They are evidence for the vital function of motive-coupling or sympathetic
mirroring of emotions in human intersubjectivity or "co-consciousness" (Tronick
and Weinberg, 1996).

M U S I C A L I T Y A N D HEALING

Mary Catherine Bateson described "protoconversation" with a 2-month-old as both

the foundation for language and the source of "ritual healing practices" (Bateson,
1979). Healing results from aid to vital functions that fights a disease process of
body and/or mind, and restores life. Communication with another person has the
power to change an individuals state from emotional withdrawal and agitation to
one of active recovery, in which the control of autonomic state, emotional calming,

the acoustic analyses of Malloch (this volume) the behaviour of the 2-month premature baby
interacting with the father's voice, and the vocal exchange recorded between the 6-week-old and
her mother illustrate this point well. The perturbation tests of Tronick (Tronick et al., 1978) and
Murray (Murray and Trevarthen, 1985) were undertaken following discovery of the efficiency of
protoconversational interactions with 2-month-olds (Trevarthen, 1998b).

197
resistance to pain and readiness to communicate and co-operate with caregivers are
improved. This may be clearly seen when the "responsive ritual" of improvisatory
music therapy has its full effect.
Case studies with premature infants in intensive care, children with terminal
illness, autism, physical or mental handicap, abused children, emotionally disturbed
teenagers, adults with neurological illness demonstrate how improvements can be
elicited by sympathetic encouragement of musical experience and participation in
musical improvisation, either with instruments or by singing (Pavlicevic, 1997;
Wigram and De Backer, 1999a, b). Shared musicality can give a guide to more
skilled action, engage the emotions and movements and give them coherence. It can
develop a patients sense of self-determination, make a verbal narrative through
which suffering or isolation may be articulated and accurately perceived within an
understanding companionship. It can also help a clinician make a diagnosis, or chart
the course of a disorder in a patients emotional responses (Pavlicevic and
Trevarthen, 1989).
Failure of "attachment" or sympathetic "companionship" early in life can have
serious consequences. In the extreme case of children born both deaf and blind,
isolation from other persons and their attempts to communicate can have seriously
depressing effect on all aspects of development, physical as well as cognitive and
emotional (Tonsberg and Hauge, 1996). Support of the body, locomotion,
perceptual alertness, memory, emotional availability, thinking, self-awareness,
language, every aspect of purposeful and conscious life and its sharing can become
enfeebled. Then it is of fundamental importance for therapeutic support to develop
the intrinsic motives that lead to cooperative awareness and the exchange of actions
and experiences. Recent advances in the methods of helping such children, inspired
by experience with music therapy and by the findings of infancy research, have
brought remarkable transformations in the life of the affected children and their
parents and siblings. Exploitation of the rhythmic anticipations of musicality, and
sensitivity to the expressive quality of spontaneous gestures and expressions that
can be transmitted by vibration and touch leads to an awakening in the deaf-blind
person of narrative consciousness and a eager adaptation to shared routines of daily
life. Before language or social skills are trained, it is necessary to activate the natural
spontaneous motives for joint activity and emotional engagement (Tonsberg and
Hauge, loc. cit).
Music is therapeutic in a more fundamental way than talk because it attunes to
the essential efforts that the mind makes to regulate the body in both its inner
processes and in its purposeful engagements with the objects of the world. It is also
a direct way of engaging the human need to be sympathised with — to have what
is going on inside appreciated by another who may give aid and encouragement.
Music therapy for human beings who are very immature, damaged, very old, or
gravely handicapped brings direct support for the central source of rhythms that
seeks to make the body do things, that generates awareness of a body-centred world

198
 M u s i c a l i t y a n d t h e Intrinsic m o t i v e p u l s e
COLWYN TREVAKTH EN

in which there are places to go and things to be done. It stimulates the need every
human being has for sympathetic company— for partners, and rivals, in moving,
noticing and understanding. The emotions or motivating qualities of a person's
acting and of being aware are shared by expressions of their every body part, but
most richly by the unaided singing of the voice, by the expressive movements of
the lips and tongue playing a wind instrument, and by the gestures of the hands
playing musical instruments. For the deaf, these same motive principles can be
transmitted and negotiated by the equivalent means of visible and tangible rhythms
of dance and gesture.
The power of music to heal becomes comprehensible when attention is given to
the vital function of intrinsically generated motor images, and the fluctuations of
emotion that validate our understanding of everything and every person 19 .

(19) Address for correspondence:

Colwyn Trevarthen
Professor (Emeritus) of Child Psychology
and Psychobiology
Department of Psychology
The University of Edinburgh
7 George Square
Edinburgh EHS 9)Z
Scotland, UK
Tel.: + 4 4 - 1 3 1 - 6 5 0 - 3 4 3 6 / 3 4 3 5 ; Fax: + 4 4 - 1 3 1 - 6 5 0 - 3 4 6 1
e-mall: c.trevarthen@ed.ac.uk

199
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