Funken Data
About Project
Funken is a series of data contributed by Erika Lunkenheimer (Assistant Professor of Human Development and Family Studies) at Colorado State. The data collected was from a Parent-Child Interaction Study (PCIS) she conducted from year 2008-2010. The study tries to understand how the early influences of parents on young children occur from moment-to-moment — for example, how and why a new positive or negative interaction pattern begins between parent and child, how each member of the interaction shapes this pattern in real time, why some patterns are short-lived and others become permanent styles of the relationship, and how different patterns ebb and flow depending on the particular situation or the developmental stage of the child and the family. It seeks to also find out more about how parent and child physiology relates to these interaction patterns as they shift from one moment to the next. These are the dynamic areas the study hopes to explore in studying how parents and children interact and how these interactions contribute to children’s normative and atypical development.
The PCIS is a short-term longitudinal study involving behavioral observations, questionnaires, and physiological data. Mothers and their 3 year-olds are observed communicating, playing, and solving puzzles together in the laboratory. It study patterns of interaction between mother and child, measuring emotions, behaviors, and physiological factors such as heart rate, breathing, and skin conductance. Children also take part in individual tasks with the experimenter to assess aspects of self-regulation, school readiness, and behavioral adjustment. Mothers and fathers/partners fill out questionnaires at Time 1, and mothers, fathers/partners, and preschool teachers fill out questionnaires at Time 2 (4 months later). The PCIS is funded by the College of Applied Human Sciences at Colorado State University.
For Playing the Archive, both percussionist Robyn Schulkowsky and Joey Baron worked closely with Mark Ballora (Associate Professor of Music Technology) at Penn State to combine electronic and acoustic sounds to sonify this data. Mark Ballora sonified the ‘child’ counterpart by feeding the data into the computer to generate very specific expressive sounds while Robyn and Joey sonified the ‘parent’ counterpart via a response using live percussion instruments.