Psychoanalysis of Music from a young age

Further reading of the development of music perception and cognition (Dowling, J) expands on the ideas that as human beings we already have a firm grasp on the understanding of music as we hear it. The majority of this understanding of musc is carried out automatically below our levels of conscious analysis as we have no time to reflect on every single detail as the piece of music progresses. This is similar to the idea of a languages native speaker, as words are spoken we don't take the time to understand the meaning of those words as we already possess the understanding as to what each word means.

Further more to expand on this is to think of a child's understanding. As a child is learning their native language for the first time, they already have an understanding for a words meaning through the actions and tones of voice used during the teaching process. This is similar in a musical sense, Tests from Cunningham and Sterling (1988) and Dolgin and Adelson (1990) showed that by the age of four, children perform well above the factor of chance in assigning one of four affective labels (happy, sad, angry and afraid) to musical excepts in agreement with adult's choices.

The perception of what we hear is not something that we think about but is something that we have learnt through the knowledge of our life of listening. To establish a character through music means to establish an initial perception of that character and how that perception should sound for the listener to identify.