Supporting Your Piano Pathway
Written by Andrew Eales
The topic of singing in aural tests has long been a contentious one. Not only have growing numbers of teachers noted how unpopular the singing tests are, but in recent years, studies have cast significant doubt on the previously assumed validity of such tests.
In this article I will explore the requirements of the main boards, consider the links between singing and ‘audiation’, touch on relevant scientific research (with links for those wanting to read more), and suggest change.
As we consider these points, we must be careful not to conflate the importance of promoting singing in music education with an insistence on assessing a pianist’s singing in a piano exam. These are two quite different issues.
Piano lessons should certainly not be limited to only include exam syllabus requirements. Nor should singing be marginalised to aural test preparation. We should of course include singing in lessons whenever appropriate for the learner’s creative and musical development.
But is singing appropriate within exam aural tests, and reliable as a means to assessing aural perception? Do singing tests offer an inclusive, level playing field for pianist assessment? And if not, what are the alternatives?
The exam board requirements
UK exam boards all include a form of aural testing in practical grade exams, but their syllabus content and approach varies considerably, highlighting a lack of professional consensus, established practice, and common understanding about how to effectively assess aural attainment.
ABRSM require singing in aural tests in all practical grades, from echo singing (Initial) to full melodies (Grade 5), and thereafter singing the upper or lower of two voices. Sight-singing is also required from Grade 4, initially a few notes written as semibreves, ultimately the lower voice of a two-part phrase while the examiner plays the upper part on the piano.
LCM: Aural tests include a singing element up until Grade 3, but none thereafter. At Grade 1 the candidate should sing a single pitch played on the piano. At Grade 3 they are asked to repeat a short melodic phrase.
MTB: Candidates are required to sing pitches heard within chords of up to four notes, as well as delivering vocal scales and repeating melodies. They offer playing a piano duet as an alternative.
RSL Awards replace traditional aural tests with playing by ear, introduced in a gradual and progressive way. Their innovative approach has practical relevance to piano players beyond the exam room, and includes no singing.
Trinity College London are notable for having avoided singing tests in piano exams for many years. Their aural tests cover a wide range of listening skills, intelligently structured around a single piece.
ABRSM’s tests are likely to be those most familiar to readers, so will be the main focus in this article.
Recognising that there’s a problem
It’s hardly surprising that many have a fundamental problem with these tests, often expressed on teacher forums.
Examples seemingly abound of pianists who switch to using different exam boards to avoid singing tests, often on the advice of experienced teachers. Probing this, they seem not to be seeking an easier path, but simply one which is more relevant to their learning journey, inclusive, and which offers a fundamentally piano-based assessment.
I have also heard distressing stories of teenagers crying and even vomiting, overwhelmed by situational anxiety. I have witnessed a small number of my own students suffer adverse reactions when asked to sing in aural tests.
I suspect examiners rarely see this for themselves, because these musicians generally decide against making the trip to the exam room, or choose a board more attentive to their personal access needs.
This brings us to the question of whether any requirement to sing in a piano exam reflects our aspirations for access and inclusion in music education. Moreover, to what extent do aural tests that rely on sung responses favour those who attend specialist or choir schools, while potentially disadvantaging other learners?
A singing test?
The point is often made that examiners are not assessing the quality of singing or vocal technique during aural tests, but merely listening for basic accuracy of pitch and rhythm. This reassurance might help put some at ease, but to what extent is it credible?
Let’s consider an example. In ABRSM Grade 4 Test B, the candidate must sight-sing a sequence of five pitches, written as semibreves. Introducing the test, the examiner instructs the candidate:
“Please sing the notes at number… on this page. Sing them slowly, and I’ll help by giving you the right note if you sing a wrong one. Here is the key-chord [name and play] and this is your starting note [name and play]… thank you.”
The direction to sing is stipulated no less than three times. How exactly is vocal technique not an issue in this test, when the outcome is so obviously contingent upon singing?
A basic understanding informs us that pitching notes with confidence and secure intonation requires control of the voice as an instrument.
Surely a candidate who sings the notes accurately, in tune and in time, should score more highly in this test than one who doesn’t. We would all rightly be concerned were that not the case.
But marks lost here could reduce an overall Distinction to a Merit, or a Pass to a Fail. To suggest that the candidate’s singing ability does not impact their final result seems disingenuous.
At this point, a colleague will usually chip in with helpful suggestions about how I could teach my piano students to sing more confidently. But this misses the central point: my students come to me to learn how to sing through their piano playing, not using their voice as an instrument, and certainly not under pressure in an exam room, and to a complete stranger.
It is understandable that some piano players consider ABRSM’s “singing to a stranger” requirement not just unexpected, but deeply weird, and entirely out of step with their musical journey.
Sight-singing and ‘audiation’
So what reasons are given for including singing tests in piano exams? According to ABRSM’s website, the aural component in their practical grade exams comprises:
“Tests to assess your musical listening skills and perception, covering pitch, pulse, rhythm, melody, harmony and other musical features.”
This reminds us of the crucial issue: do sung responses reliably demonstrate “musical listening skills and perception”, or to use the technical term coined by Edwin Gordon, ‘audiation’?
Returning to our previous ABRSM Grade 4 aural test example, the point here would seem to be to determine whether a candidate can, from the notation, form an aural perception of how it should sound. And singing might seem to offer an obvious way of finding out and assessing this.
But we have already begun to see that the introduction of vocal technique changes the nature of this test by requiring a separate skillset, an additional layer of physical processing and delivery which many simply aren’t proficient and comfortable with.
Experienced teachers will have observed that singing pitch with accuracy can prove particularly difficult for:
- older adults with increasingly frail voices
- teenage boys with changing voices
- those with a vocal-motor control impairment
- some with disabilities or muscular problems
- those suffering with chronic or acute respiratory conditions
- those with certain allergies, asthma, hay fever, etc
- anyone prone to situational anxiety
- some neurodiverse learners
Would anyone seriously venture that these groups are incapable of pitch perception, simply because they aren’t confident singers?
I should hope not. But this seems to be the implication of examination boards who use singing as a core approach to aural assessment. Simply put, this is an issue of access and inclusion, and one which has long been discussed.
However, we now also have concrete scientific answers to the complex and intriguing question of whether we can even, in any case, trust singing as an accurate way of assessing pitch perception.
Here comes the science bit…
According to a paper published in 2012 by the International Laboratory for Brain, Music and Sound Research in Montréal, an inability to sing the correct pitch is common, but this is rarely due to a perceptual (aural) deficit.
Sean Hutchins and Isabelle Peretz established that in tests, 95% of study participants were able to hear pitch aurally, and accurately match it using a pitch slider. But crucially, many of them proved unable to match the pitch by singing or humming it back.
These findings are a game-changer, because they offer empirical evidence that the use of singing to assess audiation is fundamentally flawed.
Digging deeper into their research, Hutchins and Peretz found that:
- 20% of participants had a vocal-motor control impairment that prevented them from singing the correct pitch of notes
- 35% had a sensori-motor (timbre) deficit, meaning that they had difficulty matching vocal pitch to notes played on a piano or other instrument.
In a further piece published in Frontiers in Psychology in 2013, Sean Hutchins and Sylvain Moreno considered dozens of similar studies from the last two decades, concluding:
“One of the most common assumptions about singing is that poor perception ability drives poor production ability. If people cannot hear pitches accurately, then it stands to reason that they will be inaccurate at imitating those pitches.
Several studies have investigated this hypothesis, and the evidence is mixed. Using a variety of different singing and pitch perception tasks, some studies have found evidence of a correlation between the two abilities. However, many others, using similar designs, have failed to find a significant correlation.”
Taken as a balanced whole, the research now seriously calls into question the validity of ABRSM exam results going back decades, and in every single case where the overall outcome was impacted by the candidate’s physical ability, poor vocal technique, or lack of confidence in the singing tests.
ABRSM’s existing alternatives
If there are better, more effective approaches to assessing aural it seems to me incumbent on exam boards to adopt them as a priority. Happily for ABRSM they have already developed suitable alternatives.
In their own (underused) Practical Musicianship Grade exams, ABRSM include a test in which the candidate compares a written score with an altered version played by the examiner. Trinity College London include a similar test within the aural component of their standard exams.
These tests clearly evaluate the candidate’s ability to connect sound and symbol, including other musical elements such as dynamics, articulation, harmony and tempo. They not only offer a more accurate and inclusive approach to the assessment of aural, but a more comprehensive one, too.
Even more ‘oven-ready’, ABRSM have at their fingertips a fully written, benchmarked set of aural tests for all grades that don’t include singing at all. Created for candidates who are selectively mute, you can read about these tests on the ABRSM website here.
Given that ABRSM already has up-and-running alternatives, and assuming they have done a good job in benchmarking them, why limit their access? Better, surely, to offer them as an alternative option for any candidate who would prefer not to sing in the exam room.
With their Performance Grades ABRSM have gone further still, ditching the aural tests altogether. If the Performance Grades were made available as a live face-to-face exam, they would likely prove the best choice for even more candidates, and considerably add to the appeal of ABRSM’s overall offer.
The Bottom Line
In this article we have considered evidence that compulsory singing in aural tests is neither reliable as a means to assessing musical listening skills and perception, nor appropriate in the context of the statutory requirements for access and inclusion. The research of Hutchins and others adds scientific weight to the concerns that teachers have been raising for several years.
Having largely focused on ABRSM, I must note particular disappointment that MTB, a new board whose existence only began in the years since Hutchins’ research was published, have created aural assessments which completely ignore it. The emphasis on singing in their Listening Skills tests is genuinely perplexing.
Whether in response to the science, educational rationale, or to promote wider inclusion in their exam rooms, I hope that all the boards will equally commit to removing singing tests from piano exams completely, refreshing their aural requirements to deliver music assessments that are appropriate for the 21st century.
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