SOUNDING RELATION

In the SOUNDING RELATION project, we will carefully study moment-to-moment interactions that take place between parents and infants who engage in music therapy while hospitalized following preterm birth. Our aim is to understand how parents musically contribute to the regulation of their infants and themselves within this intensive context. We will use detailed analysis of video and audiorecordings from music therapy sessions that occurred during the LongSTEP project. LongSTEP was a quantitative research project involving 213 families recruited from neonatal wards at eight hospitals in Argentina, Colombia, Israel, Norway and Poland.

Feedback from sites and participants in LongSTEP highlighted the importance of musical interaction between parents and infants, but such experiences were not reflected in the quantitative data. In Sounding Relation, we aim to identify what parents, infants, music therapists and staff do that support beneficial parent-infant regulation. The goal of new analysis of the video material is to arrive at a nuanced understanding of what happens in a musical meeting between parents and children, in a way that opens up for various perspectives.

We will do microanalyses on a selection of videos and transcribe the interaction between parents, the child and the music therapist, movements and gestures, sounds and singing. This makes it possible to understand the child's behavior and response in context. We will also transcribe what happens in the surrounding sound environment, from e.g. medical devices. The material from the microanalysis will be taken into an interdisciplinary focus group consisting of parents, a professor of composition, a nurse, a music therapist, a music sociologist and a clinical psychologist. There they will look at the parents' contribution to interaction and the child's health from a socio-ecological perspective and emphasize the musical and aesthetic aspects of the newborn ward.