A Summer of Singing for Psychology Research Student

Visitors from the U.S. usually travel to PEI to enjoy the Island's golden beaches and pastoral landscapes. Lisa McClellan was drawn to Prince Edward Island by a different type of beauty. She elected to spend her summer here as a participant in a unique research project at UPEI that focuses on two areas that she loves-music and psychology.

Lisa is a senior psychology student at Bates College in Lewiston, Maine, where she is working on a thesis about children's singing ability and interest. Bates College awarded her a Hoffman research support grant to allow her to travel to PEI to benefit from the University of Prince Edward Island's growing expertise in the field of music psychology. Since June she has been participating in the Advancing Interdisciplinary Research in Singing (AIRS) project, led by UPEI's Dr. Annabel Cohen.

AIRS explores the development of singing ability, the connections between singing and learning, and the enhancement of health and well-being through singing. Researchers are integrating new multidisciplinary knowledge about singing from the perspectives of psychology, music, linguistics, sociology, anthropology and education, assisted by computer science and audio engineering.

Lisa helped organize an international AIRS conference that included many of the researchers who are contributing to the project. She also designed her own study, building on the honours theses of recent UPEI psychology graduates Marsha Lannan, Jenna Coady and Emily Gallant. Focusing on a test "battery" developed by Professor Cohen and her students to assess people's ability to listen, process and produce sung pitches, Lisa recorded her own voice to use as a baseline for testing pitch accuracy and melodic understanding.

'Being at UPEI with people devoted to this field has been perfect for me. We don't have music cognition or music psychology specialists at my school,' she says. 'I learned a lot about conducting research, and I made contacts with researchers from around the world through the conference. I am really glad I did it.'

AIRS is a seven-year initiative that co-ordinates the work of more than 70 researchers from across Canada and many countries around the world. They will present and develop their work audiovisually, using a digital library and virtual research environment established at UPEI. The project is funded by the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada.