Listening to recorded music is likely the central music involvement activity for adults in modern society, thanks to technology development and accessibility to recorded sound. It has likewise become a ubiquitous feature in early childhood settings, in which the children are “enmeshed in an immense web of material and discursive forces, ‘always intra-acting with everything else’.” (Moss, 2016, Kindle Locations 165–167). Material webs here are the recorded music pieces and the environment, and the discursive forces are the various educational discourses of young children’s lives: their parents’, their teachers’, the Ministry of Education’s.

The literature on music listening in early childhood suggests structured ways of listening, mainly (but not only) to programme music (see Cohen, 1997, and Hefer & Cohen, 2015, on the “mirrors” approach), free moving to music chosen by the educator, and others noted in empirical studies (e.g. Gorali-Turel, 1997; Kohn & Eitan, 2016; Sims, 1987).

The developing and changing engagement of young children with self-chosen recorded pieces (from the repertoire available in the educational setting, necessarily curated by the educator), in self-initiated and self-directed activities, is less known. Children may engage with music during their free play, but educators are not always aware and appreciative of it. When they are, the children’s embodied musical understanding is transparent: through their movements they express their understanding of the musical style, the structure of the piece, its directionality and complexity (Gluschankof, 2006, 2014, 2018).

In this presentation, the embodied musical understanding of children of diverse cultural traditions (Middle-Eastern and Western) and languages (Arabic and Hebrew)—all of them living in a modern and globalized society—will be presented through their own choreographies to self-chosen music (instrumental and vocal), as documented in videos. Children experience the world multimodally, therefore records of their talking about the experience and drawing it will be included and discussed, allowing us to form impressions and insights about their musical understanding and listening experience at large.