Variation and change over time in British choral singing (1925–2019)

Abstract

The front vowels of Received Pronunciation lowered in quality over the twentieth century (Wells, 1982b; Fabricius, 2007; Bjelaković, 2017). Connections between choral singing and Southern Standard British English (SSBE) have been made in musicological literature (e.g., Potter, 1998), and with specific reference to the Choir of King’s College, Cambridge (Sagrans, 2016; Day, 2018). At King’s and places like it, choristers are likely trained to sing using features of SSBE. This study investigates whether the SSBE pattern of front vowel lowering over time is also found in choral singing, both in a dialect area where SSBE is widely spoken (Cambridge) and in a non-SSBE dialect area (Glasgow). Two electronic, automatically segmented diachronic corpora were constructed in LaBB-CAT (Fromont & Hay, 2012). F1 and F2 were extracted for the vowels /i ɪ ɛ a ɑ/. Both datasets were analysed with Bayesian linear mixed models using brms in R. A main effect of lowering is supported by the data, priors and models. This paper provides evidence that British choral singing has changed over time and that this change follows a well-evidenced change in SSBE speech. We also find evidence for a shared non-regional choral accent standard emerging in terms of front vowel height.