Description
Children are growing up with increasingly complex relationships to a range of media, and through these media are learning how to decode and interpret the semiotic codes of musical sounds, timbres, harmonies, forms and styles, both through music’s narrative functions and through a network of extra-musical/culturally learned connotations. More specifically within educational programming in early years television, highly musical worlds are being built and used to help children to learn basic numeracy, literacy, and more recently coding – but the roles of music and sound in these programmes remain largely untheorised. Building on the important work of a range of standalone essays (Lury 2002, Reyland 2010, Hayward 2012, Scoggin 2016, Maloy 2021, Golding 2024) as well as more general work on music, childhood and education (Lunde Vestad, 2010, 2017, 2022, 2023; Giuffre 2013, 2021, 2022), this paper takes elements of the BBC ‘Blocks’ Universe (Numberblocks, Alphablocks, Colourblocks and more recently Wonderblocks) to examine the various worldbuilding roles of music and sound, including but not limited to thematic development, accent and vocality, signification and narrative development, and inter-character relations. A large part of the educational function of these programmes lies in getting to know the characters and their traits as letters/numbers/colours/operators, but as Golding (2024) has identified, the seemingly ‘simple’ representation of certain characteristics can betray more problematic musical stereotypes or assumptions. This paper, then, asks not only how music is teaching numeracy or literacy, but also what it is teaching children about music, about the world, and about themselves.| Period | 26 Jun 2025 |
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| Event title | Sound on Screen IV |
| Event type | Conference |
| Location | Oxford, United KingdomShow on map |
| Degree of Recognition | International |