A quick post to celebrate my newest article, “O–hel–pu–slor”: Realization of word-final /d/ in British classical choral singing, which has just been published by International Journal of Research in Choral Singing. If you are wondering where “O–hel–pu–slor” comes from, Hugh S. Roberton — director of the Glasgow Orpheus Choir wrote that singers frequently sing
“O–hel–pu–slor” under the mistaken idea that they are singing – “O help us, Lord!” […] Why are singers so afraid to close words which have consonant endings? Not one singer in a hundred can sing “and”. It scares them to death (Roberton & Roberton, 1963, p. 50).
Roberton’s comments, originally written in 1929, about choral singer confidence in placing final consonants still resonate today. Word-final /d/ (as in good) is particularly sensitive to being reduced or avoided altogether, so I listened to every instance of it in my corpus of choral recordings, and listened and coded the type of /d/ that was produced.
In the article, I show that word-final /d/ has changed over time in recordings of the Choir of King’s College, Cambridge, becoming reinforced by affrication (a high-hat like release) and epenthesis (shadow vowels), perhaps giving the “crisp” sound identified by musicologists. It is possible that the increase in affrication was caused by King’s increasingly singing with orchestral accompaniment since the 1970s (Day, 2018) — or it could be related to an increase in affrication in white speakers of English globally (Dodsworth & Mielke, 2025).
Word-final /d/ was selected, not because it was linguistically-motivated, but because it is an identifiable stylistic feature of (British) classical choral singing. In particular, epenthesis (aka shadow vowels) [dᵊ] in phrase-final contexts may have become enregistered as a feature of a liturgical choral style. It can be jarring when these realizations are used in the performance of choral pop song arrangements, as they are not in-keeping with the listener’s expectations for the genre of the song.
I am delighted to publish this work in the International Journal of Research in Choral Singing as I was keen to show how quantitative sociolinguistic methods can be used to analyze a choral–aesthetic variable and to try and make this work more accessible for a practitioner audience. If you are a practitioner that made it here, I hope that you find this work interesting — if there is anything that I could be clearer about, feel free to reach out 🙂
You can read the full article here: https://acda.org/archives/8377
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