An Investigation of Extended Range Singing Prompts for the Singing Voice Development Measure

The Singing Voice Development Measure (SVDM) was created to provide some consistency with what children are asked to sing, how their singing is prompted, and how their singing is evaluated, particularly in research studies. Although the SVDM patterns encouraged children to use all registers of their singing voices, these patterns had an upper limit of B-flat4, which is just touching on upper register (B-flat4 and above). Some children can push their middle register to sing a B-flat or higher and would therefore be scored as a “singer” when really, they are “initial range singers.” Therefore, the purpose of this study was to investigate if children sang better and were more likely to use upper register if prompted to echo a set of patterns with a range of D4 to D5 rather than the original patterns that had a range of C#4 to B-flat4. Kindergarteners ( n = 80) and first graders ( n = 92) echoed a teacher singing both sets of patterns on text and a neutral syllable. Two raters scored all the recordings, and interrater and intrarater reliability estimates were all strong. Correlation coefficients, exploring the convergent validity of the modified patterns, were all significant and of moderate strength. The revised set of patterns are valid and can be used in subsequent research studies.