Pitch drift in a capella choral singing: the outcomes from an international survey.

Seaton, Richard; Sharp, David and Pim, Dennis (2014). Pitch drift in a capella choral singing: the outcomes from an international survey. In: Proceedings of Institute of Acoustics, 36(3) pp. 312–319.

Abstract

This paper describes work carried out during the first eighteen months’ part-time research towards the award of a PhD from The Open University. The project is researching reasons, other than the music itself, that choirs performing Western music a cappella are not able always to maintain pitch. This paper presents the initial results from a recent survey of choral practitioners. There were two main objectives: firstly, to explore the issues of pitch drift, whether it happens and if so how it affects the overall performance; secondly, to seek opinions as to the causes and remedies used to overcome the problem. The findings of the survey will be discussed along with ideas for future work, which will be undertaken with selected choirs over an extended period

Viewing alternatives

Item Actions

Export

You can export this page using these formats