ABSTRACT
This chapter reviews aspects of the development of singing as both an ordinary capacity as well as an extraordinary skill of the professional musician and suggests future acceleration of understanding in the somewhat neglected but fruitful area of music psychology. Typically combining music and text, singing engages mental capacities underlying both music and speech production and perception. Song is "one of the few aspects of human musicality that virtually all commentators agree is universally found in all human cultures". The chapter also reviews large number of informative studies on vocal musicianship and argues that much more data are needed to truly understand how singing develops under the many influences of culture, language, socio-economic status, age, musical aptitude, and personality variables. Singing, however, may be the exception to the notion of a correlation between socioeconomic status and time spent with family. The stimulus materials in this study were sung sentences that followed typical conventions of Western tonal music.
