The sound of music as first form of language and intersection of literature, music and childhood

The early perception of music, and particularly of the constituent elements of it such as melody, harmony and chords, is already noticeable at the age of 4-6 months. The emotional response to a chord change (from consonant to dissonant), the perceptual discrimination caused by a new melody or a clear rhythmic variation have an immediate reverberation in the infantile mind and are the first act of a recognizable fruition as regards a code-language that children perceive (Aslin and Hunt: Development, plasticity, and learning in the auditory system, 2001). This is the theoretical basis for exploring the psychological and aesthetic relationships between the art of sound (music) and the art of signifying sound (literature). The connections between music/sound and literature for the child are strengthened by hearing narrated stories which the child learns to decode and understand meanings and significance which enrich their experience of the world around them. This is when a relationship is established between the childhood dimension and musical breadth, which enriches the scope of multifaceted childhood language and reveals childhood to be an age of spontaneous, free, and innocent artistic expression. Hoffmann, Schumann (for example Album for the Young, Scenes from Childhood, Kreisleriana), Hugo, Liszt, Schelling, Franck, are just some of the writers and the musicians, from the nineteenth century onwards, that allow us to look at the relationship between literature and music as the keystone of a more complex codification of childhood languages that must be reinterpreted today considering this linguistic and artistic comparison.