Professor pg 11 5-31-12
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- Category: Past Issues
WILLIMANTIC --- Lynn Maxfield, assistant professor of music at Eastern Connecticut State University, a resident of Woodstock Valley, was invited to present his research at the 52nd Annual National Association for Teachers of Singing National Conference this summer in Orlando.
For more than two years, Maxfield has worked on his research, “Less Is More: Reducing Teacher Input May Lead to Increased Skill Retention.” The research involved working with voice lesson students who had varying degrees of singing experience.
For four weeks, Maxfield used high frequency feedback during the students’ lessons to instruct them.
During the next four weeks, he reduced the frequency with which he provided feedback.
Maxfield followed this technique for eight more weeks, then sent the recordings to a panel of auditors, who rated the quality of the singing without knowing whether the singing came from the high or low frequency feedback weeks. Maxfield’s research found that for younger, more novice singers, improvement in singing technique increased with more instruction.
For more experienced singers, however, the opposite was true. Less instruction gave them more opportunity to try their own hypotheses and figure out what worked for their voices.
These students performed better during the weeks of low frequency feedback.