Embodiment in early childhood music education: Leman's framework

Learning does not happen exclusively in the mind. From the very start of life, it emerges through sensory engagement with the world and through the movements and postures that drive that engagement. Movement and kinaesthetic awareness therefore play a central role in a child's physical and cognitive development, and the drive to seek sensory input through motion is an inborn mechanism that shapes how humans interact with their surroundings. This fundamental idea lies at the heart of embodied cognition theory: cognitive processes are formed by the dynamic interplay among the brain, the body, and the environment. From this perspective, the body is not merely a vehicle for carrying the mind but is essential to how we experience and understand the world. Learning, then, is ideally rooted in sensorimotor activities that involve bodily interactions with the social, cultural, and physical environment.

Educational thinkers such as Piaget, Dewey, Freire, and Vygotsky long emphasised that cognition is embodied and situated. More recent research has confirmed that body movement and its associated sensations influence learning on multiple levels. At one level, physical activity promotes readiness to learn: it boosts attention and memory (cognitive benefits), reduces stress and increases positive feelings (emotional benefits), and encourages social interaction and group cohesion (social benefits). At another level, movement directly enhances learning effectiveness. When whole-body movements, gestures, or object manipulations that align with a learning task are integrated into activities, the process becomes more efficient and yields higher learning gains. Researchers have demonstrated such effects in mathematics, language, science, and reading comprehension. By physically experiencing concepts, learners encode them multimodally, which may lead to deeper understanding.

In education, early childhood is the age category where the movement–learning link could be exploited most fully. Young children naturally want to move and learn through hands-on experience, so physical activities fit naturally into early childhood education. Yet embodiment is increasingly disappearing from early learning settings: children are treated more and more as brains alone. This shift may stem from a move toward content-driven curriculums, as well as concerns about physical touch and child safety. By contrast, early childhood music educators and traditional pedagogies such as Dalcroze and Orff have always recognised children's instinct to move to music, and they routinely use physical activities to provide rich musical experiences that foster musical understanding. However, these pedagogies are rarely informed by empirical research that explains why the body matters so much in music learning. Better insight into this question could enable educators to use the body more consciously and systematically.

The theory of embodied music cognition, together with related empirical findings, offers a framework that provides exactly such insight. This research bolsters the idea that the link between human movement and musical experience is a foundation of musical understanding. Moreover, the theory supplies a conceptual model describing the basic processes of embodied interaction with music — and therefore of embodied learning.

The embodied music cognition framework examined here was developed by Leman. It can serve as a practical tool for early childhood music practitioners who want to design movement activities that systematically deepen children's understanding of music. An interesting feature of this paradigm is that interactive technologies can also support embodied music interactions by helping to create meaningful musical experiences.

How embodied music cognition works

Embodied music cognition is a research paradigm that studies how bodily involvement shapes the way we perceive, feel, experience, and comprehend music. The central idea is that embodiment largely determines why and how a stream of sounds is experienced as music, and why engaging with music feels rewarding.

Enactment: turning sound into music through movement

A basic question when studying musical experience is how people make sense of music and learn it. From an embodied music cognition standpoint, music is not inherently meaningful. Instead, musical meaning-making results from active bodily involvement with the music. As listeners, dancers, or performers interact with music, they establish a connection among sound, movement, and intention. This connection transforms a stream of sounds into a meaningful musical experience. That transformation — called enactment — happens when sound patterns (such as chord sequences or melodies) become linked with movement patterns (like shape, direction, or energy) and, through those, with the intentional states — emotions, for instance — that underlie the movements.

Music and movement share certain fundamental features: both are time-based, so music can be experienced as a flow of movement that carries a particular quality and an intentional direction capable of evoking emotion. From this perspective, understanding music is inherently a multimodal process.

According to Leman, two processes facilitate the transformation of random sounds into music. The first involves the emergence of higher-level musical patterns that reduce the complexity of the sound stream. These structures help a person align a movement or action to the music and thereby attribute intentions to it. The beat is a clear example: once a listener perceives it, moving along becomes easier. Notably, pattern emergence can be culturally conditioned. Someone accustomed to Western classical music may find it genuinely hard to move to the complex polyrhythms of West African music.

The second process involves mediators — factors that act on the link between one's perception of musical patterns and how the brain processes them. These mediators influence which aspects of a sound pattern (for example, the subdivision of a rhythm) are selected, clarified, or reinforced. Typical mediators include attention, knowledge, moods, and — crucially — movement. In a classic study, Phillips-Silver and Trainor found that movement mediates musical perception even in young infants. Babies bounced to either duple or triple meter later preferred listening to rhythms whose accent patterns matched the one they had physically experienced. Movement, then, acts as a mediator for musical perception and meaning-making.

Building on the bond between bodily experience and musical meaning, early childhood music educators can design movement-based music activities that encourage children to make sense of music. Such activities help children build a repertoire of movements that strengthen their sound–movement–intention connection. They can broaden children's range of bodily responses to music and intensify the mediators that affect meaning-making. Ultimately, these experiences help children become responsible for their own meaning-making — in other words, to become autonomous learners.

Basic mechanisms behind musical enactment

The general process of attributing intentions to music by connecting musical and movement patterns rests on three basic mechanisms: alignment, entrainment, and prediction. The sections below explain these concepts and show how they apply in early childhood music education.

Alignment with music

When children move expressively to music, they intuitively begin to match their physical actions to what they hear. This correspondence between music and movement depends on the ability to feel the music and align movements accordingly, responding to particular musical features. Some children move to the beat; others respond more to the emotional character of the music.

Movement-response types: what children show

The ability to align movement to music can be understood in two ways. The first focuses on observable movement patterns, and here Leman distinguishes two main types.

• Phase alignment: synchronising movements to prominent time markers in the music (stepping or nodding to the beat, for instance). This type establishes a person's overall timing framework. Phase alignment does not require the movement to land exactly on every beat — a child might feel the tempo but consistently time her movement slightly early or late. It also does not mean matching every single beat; depending on the music, phase alignment might occur only on the first beat or on both the first and third beat of a quadruple meter.
• Inter-phase alignment: how the smooth, expressive flow of physical actions matches the events that happen between the beats. This type relates to musical features such as melodic contour, rhythm, dynamics, or harmony.

Essentially, phase and inter-phase alignment describe how physical actions correspond to what happens on the beat and in between the beats. Which type is more prominent depends on the musical aspect the child attends to. Still, because inner bodily rhythms and musical rhythms both function within a discrete timing structure defined by beats, meter, and tempo, the two types probably depend on each other.

Promoting self-regulation and expression structure

The second viewpoint moves beyond static movement patterns to consider how patterns reflect different mental or physical states. Leman identifies three transition processes that contribute to the feeling of being moved by music as a pleasurable, empowering experience.

1. Predictive processing: this leads to a sense of agency. When someone can foresee what comes next in the music and successfully align their movements to the sound, they feel in control. This feeling may generate satisfaction, reward, and immersion. The same process applies when interacting and synchronising with peers: what was once an individual agency (“I did it!”) becomes valued within the collective agency of a group (“We did it!”).
2. Energetic processing: the physical effort of maintaining alignment can also strengthen the sense of agency and raise arousal levels. Physical activities done to music can induce states of wakefulness, alertness, and excitement, which in turn improve executive functions and support higher cognitive processes.
3. Expressive processing: this leads to attributing affective value to music — pleasant or unpleasant, happy or sad — and fosters pro-social attitudes. Musical qualities such as variation, bass drum intensity, motive length, or timbre can shift a person's energetic state. Music can relax or activate a listener, transferring sound energy into motor energy and colouring the way movement aligns to the music.

The mutual reinforcement of these three transition processes affects feelings of reward, and reward then strengthens both alignment and entrainment — the compelling force that drives the human tendency to synchronise with music.

Entrainment in music

Aligning with music produces observable bodily patterns. This alignment takes place within a global timing framework built from synchronising movements to salient time markers such as the beat. Synchronisation is a deeply natural human behaviour — think of how walking companions unconsciously fall into step, their bodies swaying together. This pull toward synchronisation is called entrainment, and it helps a person align with music.

Broadly, entrainment refers to the coordination of temporally structured events through interaction. These events need not be social: heartbeats can entrain, and so can moving or dancing together. Entrainment provides not only timing precision and flexibility between people but also a sense of participation and emotional bonding. Remarkably, entrainment occurs between people and music, too: listeners are pulled to synchronise motor output with sensory input without actively deciding to do so. By attracting people towards the beat, entrainment enables three sensorimotor mechanisms essential to music-making.

• Finding the beat: the process of recognising regularity in the time of salient markers.
• Keeping the beat: once the beat is found, keeping it requires less conscious effort.
• Being the beat: the eventual state where prediction runs so smoothly that effort vanishes and energy is freed for other aspects of musical interaction.

From finding to being, the effort demanded decreases sharply. Finding a beat demands attention and work, but once it is locked in, resources become available for expressive nuance, peer interaction, or other creative responses to the music.

To help children experience entrainment, teachers could ask them to walk freely around the classroom while carefully listening to the sound of their own footsteps and trying to make their feet land together. Initially this might demand concentration and effort as children discover the right timing ("finding"). Eventually they will manage to step in unison, although sustaining this synchronisation still requires work ("keeping"). At that point, the educator might join in by playing drums or piano at the children's average tempo, matching the rhythm of their steps. Adjusting the music to the footstep sounds can foster the illusion that the stepping itself drives the music ("being"). Changing the tempo then prompts a new round of discovering, sustaining, and merging with the beat.

Yet entrainment does not always unfold automatically or without difficulty. For one thing, the capacity to entrain emerges only under certain conditions. A child needs to be able to detect the salient moments such as the beat, perform rhythmic patterns by moving or playing, and adapt those patterns to fit the overall temporal framework (Phillips‑Silver et al.). Beyond that, entrainment is shaped by human variables including motor variability (Demos et al.) and a preferred tempo rooted in biomechanics and internal neural clocks (Styns, Van Noorden, Moelants, & Leman). Several studies of children's spontaneous synchronisation with music indicate that not only does synchronisation improve when the music's tempo matches the child's natural pace, but the preferred tempo itself can shift over time (Van Noorden, De Bruyn, Van Noorden, & Leman).

Predicting Music

Alignment and entrainment are core processes in embodied interaction with music, closely tied to a third fundamental mechanism: prediction. Establishing a shared timing framework through entrainment and alignment rests on sensing what will happen next — anticipating how the music will unfold — and foreseeing the outcome of a movement, such as striking a drum or reaching a spatial point exactly on the beat. An embodied cognition approach holds that biomechanical constraints (e.g., the length and form of our limbs; Dahl & Huron) together with our arousal state, such as feeling tired or energetic, shape how we interact with and predict music. Rather than a direct link between music and the brain, anticipation is viewed here as the expected result of bodily‑mediated perceptions and physical actions.

Leman distinguishes different interaction situations with music governed by predictive control. When prediction succeeds, the self‑generated sensory information from playing or moving no longer needs conscious attention (attenuation), freeing mental resources for other musical elements like following the melody or observing a partner's gestures.

Children can work in pairs on mutual entrainment, imitating each other's inter‑phase alignment response to the music. Copying a partner's movement may require persistent effort and monitoring of direction or speed, potentially making it harder to focus on the music and synchronise accurately. Once a child can mimic their peer effortlessly, they no longer need to think about their own motions and can instead concentrate on the music itself and the joyful interaction.

Interestingly, Leman notes that interacting with music can become easier if a particular musical channel, such as timing, becomes predictable before others like melody or harmony — a feature called facilitation.

After children are comfortable performing a movement on every beat in a quadruple meter, they could be asked to move only on selected beats, for example the first beat alone or the first and third. This may prove harder because the time between phase‑alignment responses lengthens. Various strategies can help children refine their sense of timing during those gaps. For instance, they might step all beats but with a specific movement pattern (see Fig. 6.1) that highlights where the downbeat falls. However, a child can become so absorbed in executing the pattern that they lose connection with the music. To counter this, the educator can have the group stand in a circle where they can watch each other while

performing the pattern. Entrainment then helps align everyone's movements. When the group can execute the pattern as a whole in phase — achieving phase alignment — a sense of we‑agency may emerge, allowing attention to shift toward a different type of movement. One child might step into the circle and add a movement based on the melody (inter‑phase alignment), such as tracing its contour with arms or torso, while keeping the foot pattern going. The rest of the group can then imitate that added layer.

Finally, ambiguities in the music — whether perceptual or affective‑expressive — can hinder prediction. Music might be heard in either duple or triple meter, or as happy versus sad. Such ambiguity creates uncertainty that interferes with pattern detection and the emergence of higher‑level patterns needed for enactment, making it harder to couple states (like sadness or joy) with patterns (such as minor mode or short notes) and thereby link intentions to the music. Movement can reduce this uncertainty by aligning with the music in a way that favours one interpretation, a process known as disambiguation. For example, moving rhythmically can resolve metrical ambiguity between binary and ternary beat groupings (Naveda & Leman), and dancing a sad or happy choreography to ambiguous music influences listeners' perception of the music's emotion (Maes & Leman).

Standing in a circle, the group listens to a familiar piece. The educator's goal is to help children hear distinct lines — for instance, the bass line versus melody. Because children often focus on the melody, they may feel uncertain about the bass line. Introducing a movement that aligns with the bass line can scaffold their recognition of it.

Fig. 6.1 Two examples of feet patterns in a quadruple meter

To recap this section, turning sounds into meaningful music happens through linking movement and musical patterns, which in turn enables the attribution of intention. This rests on basic mechanisms — alignment, entrainment, and prediction — that support both cognitive processing and affective engagement. Such an empowering process ultimately facilitates expressive interaction with music.

Musical Interaction, Reward and Expression

Interacting with music is inherently rewarding. Neurobiological evidence shows that music activates the human reward system, a brain structure central to motivation, behaviour, and psychological makeup (Dubé & Le Bel; Zatorre & Salimpoor). Leman argues that this reward originates in the expressive alignment with music — using musical patterns to enact expression. The feeling of reward is thus closely tied to one's ability to anticipate and predict how the music unfolds (Huron; Salimpoor, Zald, Zatorre, Dagher, & McIntosh). According to Leman, musical interaction brings together the three interaction‑reward states described earlier: agency, arousal, and valence. These three transition processes occur concurrently and, together with pattern processing, form a cognitive‑motivational loop that generates the rewarding and empowering quality of musical experiences — the mutual reinforcement of these transitions affects reward. Expressive pattern processing involves a tight coupling between patterns and reward, where prediction, effort, and expression function as key ingredients, producing arousal, positive valence, and a sense of control.

An interesting idea is that music's rewarding nature is modulated by an innate expressive system that elicits the pro‑social value of interaction. Engaging with music taps into the human urge to evoke expressive responses from others, establishing a mutually rewarding exchange (Leman). This expressive system includes sensitivity to expressive musical elements and the ability to generate expressive actions in response. These responses have a biological origin — reflexes like the urge to express — and a cultural origin involving reflex control shaped by implicit and explicit learning. Consequently, musical activities integrating movement not only support developing control over reflexes but also expand a learned repertoire of musical responses.

Technology Supporting Embodied Music Learning

The embodied music cognition paradigm has strong ties to interactive technologies, since sensor systems can measure bodily involvement in musical interactions. A key research strategy is to create ecologically valid situations by embedding sensors into interactive music systems, allowing participants to engage in meaningful activities. This has produced a range of applications that both enable quantitative study of the body in music experience and open new learning environments that exploit embodiment's value for education.

For example, Besound helps young children learn composition basics by exploring rhythm, melody, and harmony through mimicking objects or characters. Whole‑body movements are analysed in real time and used to control sound (Volpe, Varni, Addessi, & Mazzarino). Another example is the Music Paint Machine (MPM), a tool that engages young learners in multimodal experiences while learning to play an instrument (Nijs & Leman). Combining movement with music, children create a digital painting. The MPM's concept is grounded in the framework described here, integrating music, movement, and creative visualisation to address the basic enactment mechanisms. Teachers can flexibly design activities ranging from free exploration with sound and visuals to guided step‑by‑step tasks that lead toward specific learning goals.

Building on the Music Paint Machine, a consortium including Ghent University, Erasmus Rotterdam, arts universities in Rotterdam and Amsterdam, the creative industry (The Patching Zone), and the cultural organisation CKC Zoetermeer is developing Singewing Space. This web‑based interactive application supports augmented blended music learning through an “embodied” approach, connecting face‑to‑face and distance learning while incorporating sensor technology for online use. Using motion capture and sound recording, the system lets users play, sing, and move to music alone or simultaneously with others (see Fig. 6.2). Children will be able to (1) collaboratively create a music visualisation in a virtual environment, (2) respond musically to each other's creations through physical actions that generate sound, (3) adapt existing or newly created material, and (4) reflect on the musical experience.

We believe Singewing Space holds considerable potential for early childhood music education. Although music technology can sometimes be met with hesitation by educators, it can create learning opportunities for young children and bridge the gap between school music and home musical life (Young). The tool allows transforming musical ideas into visual representations and movements, and vice versa. Young notes that children naturally enjoy shifting between modalities, and transforming musical ideas between forms can spark new connections and ideas. Multimodal transformation also highlights specific musical features, making them easier for children to share and comprehend. Singewing Space implements the embodied music cognition framework described in this chapter, addressing the enactment process and its basic mechanisms via the pairing of music with visuals and movement. For instance, the beat can be automatically visualised (phase alignment), while the movements between beats (inter‑phase alignment) can be shown based on a child's hand gestures. Moreover, because the system can track multiple children at once,

Fig. 6.2 The concept of Singewing Space: different users can interact in a shared virtual space, each choosing an action control (play, sing, move, keyboard)

each player could appear as a differently coloured line, encouraging participatory creativity through co‑creating a visualisation based on music and movement.

Conclusion

Music learning is fundamentally about making sense of music. In early childhood education, it is vital to design activities that enrich children's experiences and provoke musical meaning‑making. That process can be viewed through sociological, anthropological, or psychological lenses. This chapter presented a psychological perspective grounded in embodied music cognition, which posits that musical meaning at its most basic level arises from enactment — an intentionality‑induction mechanism built on linking sound with movement. Coupling pattern processing to agency, arousal, and affect produces the rewarding effect of musical interactions, placing the body at the centre of even the highest levels of meaning‑formation.

Therefore, music education should actively address the body's fundamental role. Understanding enactment's core mechanisms — alignment, entrainment, and prediction — can equip practitioners with insights for designing movement‑based activities that promote embodied understanding. These mechanisms also serve as lenses for observing children's growing comprehension of music.

Technology offers ways to translate embodied music cognition theory and research into powerful learning environments. By implementing a multimodal approach with movement sensors and visualisation, these environments can support embodied music learning and participatory sense‑making through collaborative enactment.

In short, an embodied music cognition perspective can be a valuable tool for early childhood music practitioners seeking activities that encourage children to connect sound and movement in meaningful, expressive, and fulfilling ways. Conversely, practical applications may inspire researchers to pose deeper questions about the body's role in musical meaning‑formation. As embodied cognition theory continues to develop, it holds promise for connecting with the rich variety of sources and ideas around musical meaning and embodied learning.

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