Infants and children in their earliest years (6 months to 3 years) are highly motivated to act on objects to produce sounds and to explore the possibilities of sound production. Yet educational practice and music education research rarely concentrate on very young children's abilities to produce sounds with objects or with age-appropriate musical instruments. There is, however, a small corpus of studies that have explored sound production among the under-3s and have suggested the importance of this activity in early musical development. In this article we first introduce and discuss this corpus of studies. In light of the theories of musical gesture and sound production emerging from these studies, we then propose a complementary music education perspective for young children under 3 years of age which is focused on sound production with objects.