The Octopus Project—‘I was Making Bing and Bong’: Children's Conceptions of their Own Musical Improvisations

Abstract

This article describes a phenomenographic study of children's experience of music in the natural context of an early childhood centre. Within a large collaborative research venture, The Octopus Project, children were observed improvising on musical instruments. They were interviewed later about their spontaneous musical play, and transcripts of the interviews were central in the analysis. The research process, which includes the use of video, is discussed in this article. The preliminary findings presented shed light on the wealth of informal musical knowledge children bring to the early childhood setting.