Hearing Singing:

A Guide to Functional Listening and Voice Perception

Author Ian Howell

Release date March 18, 2025

Publisher Rowman & Littlefield (publisher’s website)

Number of pages 254 with web resources

Or order wherever books are sold

About the book

Hearing Singing provides a wealth of discoveries at the intersection of voice perception, voice production, functional voice teaching, and functional listening, while providing exercises and actionable steps for singers and teachers.

Ian Howell starts with a broad exploration of how science and voice teaching intersect, investigating the reasons voice teachers and singers encounter scientific ideas in the manner they do. He dives into current models to consider the intersection of voice acoustics, perception, and the physical means of voice production, revealing gaps in common models used in voice pedagogy and vocology.

The book provides a groundbreaking, new framework to hear singing with actionable detail, well-supported by scientific literature. Howell proposes a model that better aligns what we hear with how we imagine the voice works and offers a framework to apply these ideas within a cohesive approach to functional voice teaching, encouraging the application of the functional listening skills explored throughout. Also included are lab assignments and discussion questions.

Reviews

Hearing Singing connects scientific principles with practical teaching strategies, offering a fresh approach to understanding and teaching the singing voice. By critically engaging with existing frameworks and introducing new insights, this book equips educators and students with tools to better hear, analyze, and teach.

— Aaron Johnson, co-director, NYU Voice & Swallowing Center, associate professor, NYU Grossman School of Medicine

Hearing Singing is a significant addition to the evolving conversation of voice pedagogy. Howell's deep dive into both the psychoacoustics and acoustics of voice—how human brains experience and process sung sounds and the bio-acoustic models of vocal function—will be of great interest and benefit to those teachers curious and willing enough to plumb those depths with him. Howell guides us in ways vitally productive for studio efficiency.

— Kenneth Bozeman, author of Practical Vocal Acoustics: Pedagogic Applications for Teachers and Singers

This is a must-read for anyone who instructs singing. Howell’s contributions to singing voice perception are some of the most important additions to voice pedagogy scholarship of the past half-century. I encourage readers to take their time, engage with the material, and build for themselves the functional listening skill set found within. The structural framework presented, when understood, can eliminate the guesswork that is historically a part of training voice teacher listening.

— Nicholas Perna, associate professor of voice, director of vocal pedagogy, University of Colorado Boulder

Contents 

Preface
Chapter 1 Introduction
Chapter 2 How We Got Here
Chapter 3 Refining Models for Understanding the Singing Voice
Chapter 4 What is Timbre?
Chapter 5 Pitch
Chapter 6 Time and Pressure Domain Considerations of Pitch and Timbre
Chapter 7 Perceptual Qualities of Auditory Roughness and Pitch Resolution
Chapter 8 Tone Color and Brightness
Chapter 9 Absolute Spectral Tone Color
Chapter 10 How Pitch, Auditory Roughness, and Tone Color Intersect: Theory and Application
Chapter 11 How to Teach Singing
Chapter 12 Pedagogic Practices and Functional Listening Examples
Appendix A: How to Read Graphs Related to Voice Production
Appendix B: List of Labs and Website URL