Music and Communication with Ekanem Ebinne

Get exclusive content. Join our Pateron >>

February 3, 2022

Ekanem Ebinne is a musical parenting coach with 15 years of experience as a kids and family music programmer, in a wide range of musical styles. She is trained in developmental musical psychology and certified to teach music for infants and young children by the Gordon Institute for Music Learning. Ekanem has worked with kids and adults from over 15 countries.

Music has always been about connecting with other people

“Music has always been about connecting with other people….but right now music is about connecting to what’s stable and beautiful and hopeful for me from the past and hopefully going into the future”. Ekanem and I explore the world of connection, communication, children and parenting through music. Music and communication.

Have we lost our connection to music? Are we disconnected from the right to be musical? This is explored as part of the Deschooling theme this season. We discuss how we view music as a form of communication and relationship with others, particularly with our children and ourselves.

In this episode

In this episode we explore the power and history of music. “All behaviour is musical. Tone, intensity, rhythmic. Tuning in is a way of communicating and relating to each other.” If all behaviour is musical, then why do we compartmentalize music in our learning and life? Ekanem takes me on an exploration of:

Music and Communication
The ways we have lost touch with our “music-ing”
The words we use that discourage the musical process and musical communication in our everyday lives. “I can’t sing”, “tone deaf”…what that really means and how we can shift our words and perspective
Two ways we can improve our basic “Musicman-ship”
Using and introducing instruments to our young children- where and how do we start?
Building an initial vocabulary of music from our children’s infancy
Finding and supporting our child’s natural rhythm and musical tastes

Ekanem’s work focuses on mothers with young children and supporting music from those stages but she says that it is never too late. Even if we didn’t start young. We can still bring music into the rhythms of our every day.