Development of an instrument for analyzing the characteristics of the soundtracks of children’s television programmes

Abstract

Television is one of the most important elements in the construction of the musical and audible reality of children and teenagers. It offers a selected and edited version of a musical environment, with an indisputable level of communicative and patrimonial influence. This paper is part of a research project that sets out to know what children are listening to in children’s television programming, in a sample of Latin American television coverage. The general objective has been to establish the parameters of everyday listening experiences and to create an instrument which is able to determine the objective elements of listening environments through their most notable medium: the soundtrack of children’s television programmes. Here we present the creation and validation process of such an instrument. The more important elements are the consensus process, since we attempt to validate the instrument within the Latin-American context and decision-making because of the inherent characteristics of the music as variable analysed, since sound develops over time, and this makes an accurate classification of it very difficult.