Singing teachers often recommend critical listening activities to their students, both to expose them to great performances by various singing artists and thereby set standards and provide references to evaluate their own work in practice sessions, singing lessons, and performances. However, inexperienced students often admit that they do not truly understand what they are supposed to be listening for in these recordings, falling back on pre-existing aesthetic preferences to judge the quality of the performances rather than considering and detecting perceptual information that can be connected to the physiological, acoustical, and musical characteristics of the performers and their artistic interpretations. Using the principles of “technical ear training” from sound engineering education (e.g. Corey & Benson, 2016, p. 3) that seek to strengthen critical listening skills, two university singing programs (Coastal Carolina Univerisity/USA and Musikhögskolan i Piteå/Sweden) adopted a listening activity to improve timbre discrimination skills in classical and CCM singing students. 

In a procedure developed with project advisor, M. Nyssim Lefford, Ph.D, M.S. (specialist in music production, music cognition, and auditory perception), each subject selected a short excerpt from a recording of a favorite singing artist with a similar voice type to their own and uploaded it into a program that allows the application of frequency filters. The excerpt was first played in its original form, followed by a series of repetitions using different combinations of filters applied to various frequency bands selected by the researchers to isolate important perceptual features of the singer’s voice and interpretational choices. This procedure was repeated two subsequent times with new student-selected recordings. Students wrote reflections after each session guided by general questions from the researchers. Results will be discussed and compared between the two subject groups along with implications for singing pedagogy and curricula and suggestions for future work.