Stadler Elmer, Stefanie, KV1 Stadler Elmer, S. (2011). Structural aspects of early song singing. In A. Baldassare (ed.), Music – Space – Chord – Image. Festschrift for Dorothea Baumann‘s 65th birthday (pp. 765-782). Bern: Lang. Structural aspects of early song singing Stefanie Stadler Elmer Abstract ͳ Early song singing is a natural phenomenon still rarely studied. It reveals a child’s access to both music and language within a cultural setting, on the basis of predisposed human faculties. In this study a young (1 year and 8 months) girl’s singing of a traditional song was analysed with computer-aided methods. The results show that she produced relevant features in structured time to create a song that resembles the model in many respects. The comparison with the song model revealed some of her strategies in solving the problem of producing a stream of ordered sounds. Musical elements such as melodic contour, phrase segmentation, periodic stress (or metric) pattern, repetition and variation, and onomatopoeic syllable formation are major constituent elements, whereas linguistic features such as pronouncing syllables or forming words are less clear or even absent. The results of this case study are congruent with the singing-before-speaking or the musical- origins-of-language hypothesis. 1. Introduction For most children in any culture, songs are the first comprehensive musical form they encounter, mostly directed to them in form of lullabies and other songs sung by their parents or caregivers. Probably in all cultures, parents discover that singing makes it possible to induce or enhance feelings of comfort and wellbeing in both the singer and listeners. In recent decades, the affect-regulating functions of song singing have received more attention in research. Caregivers’ infant- and child-directed song singing has become a growing subject of interdisciplinary interest for infant 1 I am very grateful to Zvi Penner and Dorothea Baumann for inspiring discussions on this subject. - As a collaborator in the AIRS (Advancing Interdisciplinary Research in Singing) MCRI (Major collaborative Research Initiative) supported by the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada (SSHRC), I also express my appreciation for the scholarly opportunities provided at the international level.