‘You Can Count On Us!’ On The Importance Of Listening To Children’s Media

Description

Article 31 of the UN Convention on the Rights of the Child stipulates the right to participate in cultural life and the arts. However, despite the rapid growth of screen media targeted at young children, the musical content within these media products remains largely under-examined in terms of its social and cultural implications. 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 timbres, harmonies, forms and styles, both through music’s narrative functions and through a network of extra-musical/culturally learned connotations. Questions regarding how music affects young viewers to stimulate cognitive activity, maintain attention or soothe them have been tackled by music psychologists, but deeper questions of what music is teaching them about the world, about cultural histories, and indeed about themselves, remain unanswered.
Some scholarship on the music of children’s media exists in the form of standalone essays on particular programmes or assets (Lury 2002, Reyland 2010, Hayward 2012, Scoggin 2016), notably including Rosemary Golding’s 2025 article in the most recent issue of MSMI. A few researchers including Ingeborg Lunde Vestad and Liz Giuffre have committed more long-term scholarly focus to the area, and beyond musicology there exists a significant amount of relevant scholarship from the fields of music education, music psychology, music therapy and children’s media studies, though much of this has focused on more discipline-specific objectives, and there is little work to date on broader questions of media music’s relation to children’s identity and cultural development. With the help of a few choice examples this position statement argues for the importance and relevance of children’s media and its music(s) to our developing understanding of media music and audiences more widely.

Period	17 Jul 2026
Event title	MSMI 20th Anniversary / Sound on Screen Annual Conference
Event type	Conference
Location	Manchester, United KingdomShow on map
Degree of Recognition	International