Dr Martin Ashley - Bristol, UK

Dr Ashley is a Principal Lecturer in the Faculty of Education at the University of the West of England. He has published significantly in the area of boys and singing and continues to research the gender imbalance in singing and other performing arts, including dance. Dr Ashley directs the "BRISTOL VOICES" project which has been using Sing & See as part of a project to show primary school children that it's 'cool' for boys to sing high notes.

At the moment, I am using Sing & See in two related ways, both under the umbrella of 'increasing the interest in voice of young males through technology'. I have created an audio-visual road show for use in primary schools where there is no tradition of boys' singing. The session begins with a perceptual test where the children have to identify the gender and age of singers in short excerpts. Having given their answers, the children then hear the excerpts again, but with pictures of the singers, who are mostly boys. This invariably results in considerable surprise, as most English primary schoolchildren now believe that boys can only sing in a "low, gruff voice". Having gained interest in this way, the children are then invited to talk into a microphone and see a pitch trace projected onto a large screen. We use Sing and See to explain that singing a note as opposed to speaking really means producing a trace that stays steady along the bars. Many boys (aged about 8) are keen to try this and lose their inhibitions in the excitement. We then explain to them that their "singing range" is two or three notes below to perhaps many notes above. How many? We illustrate this by playing a brief extract of a boy singing the Allegri Miserere, illustrated by a Sing & See display. There are often gasps of amazement!

The second use to which we put Sing & See is with experienced boy singers who are about to undergo voice change. We draw heavily on John Cooksey's work on voice change and are using Sing & See to educate the boys themselves about their changing voices. We have recruited a number of boys to the project and we are taking bimonthly measurements of their growth and changes to their voices. Sing & See has proved especially useful in illustrating Cooksey's voice change phases and to locate a boy's current tessitura. Through this, we have successfully identified boys who are in the "cambiata" phase and they have collaborated with us in choosing songs to record at cambiata pitch and range. This process, combined with some spectrographic analysis, is proving successful in retaining the interest of adolescent boys who might otherwise drift away from singing once their treble voices are no longer of use to their cathedral or church choir (regretably a common occurrence in the UK!). Sing & See is proving an asset in our endeavour to capitalise on the interest that many boys have in technology.

Find out how to get Sing & See here.

Other pages of interest:
An introduction to using Sing & See in teaching
Benefits that Sing & See can bring to your teaching studio
Other stories from teachers using Sing & See
Research papers about visual feedback in singing training
Information on different versions of Sing & See