{'fraction_non_alphanumeric': 0.017889087656529516, 'fraction_numerical': 0.0026833631484794273, 'mean_word_length': 5.505813953488372, 'pattern_counts': {'":': 0, '<': 0, '<?xml version=': 0, '>': 0, 'https://': 0, 'lorem ipsum': 0, 'www.': 0, 'xml': 0}, 'pii_count': 0, 'substrings_counts': 0, 'word_list_counts': {'cursed_substrings.json': 0, 'profanity_word_list.json': 0, 'sexual_word_list.json': 0, 'zh_pornsignals.json': 0}}
Theorizing musical childhoods with illustrations from a study of girls’ karaoke use at home

Information and insights concerning children’s everyday musical practices in the middle years of childhood are beginning to develop across a number of disciplines, but as yet they are fragmented and have had little impact on music education practice. There is a need to find a conceptual framework capable of integrating information from different disciplines, including the psycho-pedagogical perspectives that have tended hitherto to be the dominating perspectives in education. In this article I propose that childhood studies, specifically drawing on the theoretical perspective of Alan Prout, offer a conceptual framework for this purpose. Accordingly, musical childhoods are conceived as ‘assemblages’ constituted by biological, material/technological and social elements. The discussion in this article was motivated and is illustrated by a small-scale study that investigated singing with karaoke, in particular karaoke video games, at home among children aged between 6 and 11 years living in a rural area of the UK.