I am a semiprofessional choral singer. Through phonetic training I developed an interest in the intersection of speech, sociolinguistics, and singing. My PhD ‘Do choirs have accents? A sociophonetic investigation of choral sound’, investigated the factors that influence choir accents in 25 hours of commercially-released recordings of the choir of King’s College, Cambridge, and the Glasgow Orpheus and Phoenix choirs (1925–2019). I created the first time-aligned phonetic corpus of choral singing and extracted acoustic data from vowels, and auditorily coded the realisation of postvocalic /r/ (e.g., car) and word-final /d/ (e.g., lord).
Shared front vowel phonology
I found evidence of a shared choral phonology in Glasgow and Cambridge. In a Bayesian mixed effects regression analysis of acoustic measures F1 and F2 frequencies, I found that KIT, DRESS and TRAP demonstrate a pattern of lowering over time (Marshall, Stuart-Smith, Butt, & Dean, 2024) consistent with a change in a spoken prestige accent, from Received Pronunciation to Southern Standard British English (e.g. Hawkins & Midgley, 2005). Separate TRAP and BATH phonemes were found in both Glasgow and Cambridge, which does not reflect local speech vowel phonology in Glasgow. These findings suggest an emerging standard ‘accent’ of choral singing that has changed over time, following the pattern presented by Received Pronunciation.
Regional variations in choral sound
Regional accent phonology can also affect the choral signal. The Glasgow Orpheus and Phoenix choirs produced postvocalic /r/ significantly more frequently than the choir of King’s College, Cambridge. These findings are published in Marshall (2023) and I have a further manuscript under review which illuminates possible reasons for a reduction of postvocalic /r/ over time in the Glasgow data. Rhoticity (auditory coding of 8,407 tokens) differs between the Glasgow choirs and King’s, as we might expect, based on regional accent phonology. The Glasgow choirs produce postvocalic /r/ in all contexts, though there is a reduction over the twentieth century; they also produce alveolar trill realisations in initial position 50% of the time in the Orpheus Choir early recordings directed by Hugh S. Roberton (1925–1945), perhaps indicating that the variable was enregistered as part of a distinctly Scottish choral sound.
Impact of choir director
Finally, I found that a choir director can have a significant impact on the choral signal. In the recordings analysed, David Willcocks, director of the choir of King’s College, Cambridge, altered the acoustic vowel space, reflecting more conservative varieties of Received Pronunciation, as suggested by musicologists (Potter, 1998; Day 2014). These findings are published in Marshall et al. (2024).
My thesis provides a novel quantitative sociophonetic analysis of classical choral singing in the UK. I have successfully published my research in Laboratory Phonology, and have another manuscript in the second round of review at Journal of English Linguistics. I presented my research at the International Congress of Phonetic Sciences (published in Marshall, 2023) and the British Association of Academic Phoneticians Colloquium.
Prior to my PhD
I gained experience in experimental phonetic methods from my master’s research in which I conducted a replication study of a pitch-matching experiment, and a novel vowel-matching experiment. Overall singers were able to complete the vowel matching task, but had longer reaction times for the vowel matching than for the pitch matching task. My research demonstrated that singers are able to match vowel quality in an experimental setting when instructed to by a researcher. However, the extent to which experienced choral singers phonetically converge remains to be investigated.
My PhD project was funded by the Arts and Humanities Research Council (ref: 2284740). My PhD research data and code is available on the Open Science Framework.
Publications
Marshall, E. J. (2026) “Sweet singing in the choi/r/”: How spoken dialect affects choral phonology in Glasgow and Cambridge, Journal of English Linguistics, accepted for publication (February 2026) https://eprints.gla.ac.uk/381623/
Marshall, E. J., Stuart-Smith, J., Butt, J. & Dean, T., (2024) “Variation and change over time in British choral singing (1925–2019)”, Laboratory Phonology 15(1). doi: https://doi.org/10.16995/labphon.10125
Marshall, E. J. (2023) O lo/r/d, open thou ou/r/ lips: Rhoticity in choral singing from Glasgow and Cambridge, In: Radek Skarnitzl & Jan Volín (Eds.), Proceedings of the 20th International Congress of Phonetic Sciences (pp. 2184-2188). Guarant International. https://www.internationalphoneticassociation.org/icphs-proceedings/ICPhS2023/full_papers/810.pdf
Robertson-Kirkland, B. E., Tip, L. M., Boyd, S. F. and Marshall, E. J. (2021), Accessibility, interdisciplinarity and practice: the benefits and challenges of hosting an online, interdisciplinary conference on singing. Journal of Music, Health and Wellbeing (pp. 1–15). ISSN 2515-981X
Grants & Awards
My doctoral research was funded by the UK Arts and Humanities Research Council, AHRC Project Code: 2284740 (10/2019–08/2023). I have a track-record of small grant success including:
- International Phonetic Association Student Award (08/2023, £600, to attend ICPhS August 2023).
- University of Glasgow Chancellor’s Fund (2022, £2,000, University of Glasgow Opera Society).
- School of Critical Studies Strategic Research Support Fund (2021 R2, £500).
- University of Glasgow Chancellor’s Fund (2020, £1,000, SOS2020)
- Scottish Graduate School of Arts and Humanities Cohort Development Fund (2020, £800, SOS2020)
- Scottish Graduate School of Social Sciences Student-led Training Fund (2020, £500, SOS2020)
- University of Glasgow College of Arts Collaborative Research Award (2020, £510, SOS2020)
- University of Glasgow Chancellor’s Fund (2018, £1,600)
- Christian Kay Prize for Outstanding Achievement in Undergraduate Research in Linguistics 06/2018.