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. 2018 Oct 4;9:1680. doi: 10.3389/fpsyg.2018.01680

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Copyright © 2018 Malloch and Trevarthen.

This is an open-access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License (CC BY). The use, distribution or reproduction in other forums is permitted, provided the original author(s) and the copyright owner(s) are credited and that the original publication in this journal is cited, in accordance with accepted academic practice. No use, distribution or reproduction is permitted which does not comply with these terms.

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Stories of changing pitch in the singing voice. These examples illustrate the narrative phases that infants respond to, which are found in infant directed speech or baby songs in different languages. (A) A proto-conversation of a mother with a 6-week-old. The baby shares the development, climax and resolution of the narrative, with vocalizations close to middle C. (B) A slow lullaby, of 26 s, has four-line stanzas, with rhyming vowels. (C) A more animated song of 18 s shows the same poetic organization with undulations of pitch and vowels rhyming between first and second lines and between final words of each verse. (A) Original in Malloch (1999), Figure 5, p. 41. (B) From Trevarthen (2015), a portion of Figure 4, p. 137, and Trevarthen (2016), Figure 3, p. 10. Original in Malloch (1999), Figure 10, p. 49. (C) Original in Trevarthen (1999), Figure 2, p. 183.