When the Sound Becomes the Goal. 4E Cognition and Teleomusicality in Early Infancy
Bibliographic record
Abstract
In this paper we explore early musical behaviors through the lenses of the recently emerged "4E" approach to mind, which sees cognitive processes as Embodied, Embedded, Enacted, and Extended. In doing so, we draw from a range of interdisciplinary research, engaging in critical and constructive discussions with both new findings and existing positions. In particular, we refer to observational research by French pedagogue and psychologist François Delalande, who examined infants' first "sound discoveries" and individuated three different musical "conducts" inspired by the "phases of the game" originally postulated by Piaget. Elaborating on such ideas we introduce the notion of "teleomusicality," which describes the goal-directed behaviors infants adopt to explore and play with sounds. This is distinguished from the developmentally earlier "protomusicality," which is based on music-like utterances, movements, and emotionally relevant interactions (e.g., with primary caregivers) that do not entail a primary focus on sound itself. The development from protomusicality to teleomusicality is discussed in terms of an "attentive shift" that occurs between 6 and 10 months of age. This forms the basis of a conceptual framework for early musical development that emphasizes the emergence of exploratory, goal-directed (i.e., sound-oriented), and self-organized musical actions in infancy. In line with this, we provide a preliminary taxonomy of teleomusical processes discussing "Original Teleomusical Acts" (OTAs) and "Constituted Teleomusical Acts" (CTAs). We argue that while OTAs can be easily witnessed in infants' exploratory behaviors, CTAs involve the mastery of more specific and complex goal-directed chains of actions central to musical activity.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame distilled prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. Learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and 10,348 direct Gemma labels. Candidate is the union of thresholded teacher heads; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels or direct frontier model labels.
Codex and Gemma teacher scores by category
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one teacher head, not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".