Today's babies and toddlers see adults using mobile phones and quickly come to recognise the ringing tones and musical tunes they make. They are surrounded by electronic sounds, bleepers, bells, buzzers and tunes from equipment in their own homes and by toys that have musical tunes and interesting sounds built into them through digitised processes.
This is their contemporary world - one in which digitised sounds can very easily be built into all kinds of equipment. Watch a one- to two-year-old with a piece of equipment or a new toy and you will see tiny fingers quick to explore and discover the buttons; pressing, tapping or turning, to produce the different effects.
I find there are two responses to these kinds of toys. People either criticise them for being somehow inferior or 'kitsch', or they recognise that children are gaining from playing with them.
If you listen carefully to musical toys you will discover some play just a single line of melody and some have a denser and more interesting harmonic texture. Listen carefully when you select the toys and decide whether you find the quality of the melodies interesting and pleasing or not; much depends on the size of the toy and therefore how much the sound can be amplified.
Another important factor is the way in which the musical toys are used with children. Watching mothers at a Stay and Play, I noticed some mothers joined in, singing or jigging along to the tune, or encouraging their children to sing or dance, or carefully helping their children to discover what the toy could do. Like all toys, however 'all singing and all dancing'
as they are, they are no substitute for quality interaction with adults.
