Ideal singing posture: Evidence from behavioral studies and computational motion analysis

Background in music psychology. It is widely accepted among professional singers and vocal teachers that there is a relationship between a singer’s posture and the quality of their voice. Behavioral studies have shown that listeners are able to detect differences in the quality of the singing voice by listening to simple recordings (e.g., Mitchell & Kenny, 2007), while observers are very sensitive to postural information contained in point light displays (PLD’s) of human activity (e.g., Davis and Gao, 2004). Thus, we would expect that independently obtained ratings of the auditory and visual elements of a singer’s performance would reveal relationships between posture and voice quality.