Turning children's music into numbers
... in other words How to quantify subjective aspects of media made for children (and others).
... officially known as The Children's Music Quotient: Quantifying the Childness of Music Recordings Made for Children.
Have a read of my recently-published paper.
In the paper ...
I propose a method that helps to describe and quantify the content of children's media (or any other media). I devised a form of content analysis to look at children's music. I used it to investigate the 'childness' (an abstract and inherently subjective and qualitative concept devised by Peter Hollindale) of records made for children. I called in the Children's Music Quotient or CMQ for short.
Why is it important:
Analysing the content of children's media - their games, books, television programs, films or, in my case, recordings - reveals the messages that adult creators send TO children and ABOUT children (i.e. the power relationships between adults and children, or producers and consumers). My method helps to put figures, percentages and numbers on various aspects of the content. The figures can then be analysed and displayed as graphs, charts, tables, etc. The method is useful to spot trends in groups of texts, or aspects of individual texts that might not be detectable from qualitative analysis alone.