Some people think that singing in the choir is for people who aren’t good enough to be soloists. To borrow from Shaw, “Those who can, sing; those who can’t, join the choir”... Maybe there’s a tiny grain of truth in this, but only tiny. Lots of great soloists sing in choirs. And it’s not that people who could sing solos worth listening to should do that instead of singing in the choir. And it’s also not that people who sing in choirs are a bit rubbish.

Singing in a choir is a completely different thing from singing a solo, not a downgraded version of the same thing. Of course, singing with others is a different social experience. There’s so much joy in making music with other people - the social aspect is important and its effect on people is well-documented (For example, this interesting article about how singers’ heartbeats synchronise https://www.bbc.com/news/science-environment-23230411 ).

But the music, the sound itself, changes. For one thing, a single voice can sing only a melody or tune - just one line of music. Think of that as the horizontal plane. Whereas a group of voices can sing harmony - different notes that fit together, all sounding at the same time. Think of that as a vertical plane moving through time, so there’s an extra dimension. It’s true that accompanying instruments can supply the harmony for a solo voice, and that’s beautiful too. But there’s something really glorious about just voices providing all that the music needs.

Here’s what I’ve come to understand about group singing, though: voices change when they sing with other voices. And this happens on two levels: for one thing, the voices themselves blend such that the sound is a kind of alchemical mixture of the component sounds. So in a section (I’m talking about sopranos, basses and so on) you might have a group of singers and not a single one of them would really stand out as a soloist, but the sound they make together is outstanding because of the way the voices blend and what they create together.

It doesn’t require one single “good” voice for a group of voices to sound great. Sometimes one voice will provide a point of focus for the others, but it isn’t necessarily so. And every single voice in the mix is important and affects the overall sound, however subtly. It’s one of the reasons I love working with choirs so much. People who are afraid of making a sound, who might think they’re not “good” singers, slowly realise that their voice is part of something that sounds truly amazing. This is a real thing - not something I made up to help less confident singers feel better, but a function of acoustics. The characteristics of different voices mixed together can take off edges, and round out and warm the tone. This works best if everybody is singing the same shaped vowels, and if the individual singers are singing with good resonance - this is part of the reason we bang on so much about vowel shapes!

But the second thing, equally important, is that individual voices change when people sing together. Have you noticed that when you’re practising by yourself at home, you’re not always quite as happy with your voice as you are when singing in the middle of the choir? I’ve experienced it myself when rehearsing choral music alone at home. And we noticed it a lot during covid, when people were in zoom sessions and could only hear themselves in isolation for much of the time. Lots of you said it just wasn’t the same as singing in the choir, and you were right.

As people hear their own voice in the context of other voices, they make tiny changes that might add up to more resonance, better tuning and rounder tone - those things aren’t all external, they’re happening inside the individual voices as well. This is partly about confidence and relaxation, but it’s also partly about the interaction between what we hear and how our voices work. It feels good to sing, and we hear a lovely sound, we do more of what is working, so maybe we sing with better technique than we otherwise would. And acoustics are at work here too. You might have had the experience of feeling like your voice is floating on the sound when you sing next to one person, but next to another person it might feel like wading through mud. It’s not that necessarily that the voices are particularly right or particularly wrong, but the acoustic properties of the two voices can feedback to the singers, enhancing what’s there already. Two voices which naturally make a lovely blended sound can lead to the singers relaxing and singing even better. But sometimes the two voices are fighting each other, making it hard for each to sing and sometimes even to stay in tune.

Voice-matching, a system for placing singers next to singers who help them sing with freedom and ease, is a useful tool for making sure that singers have the best possible experience at choir, so our choir leaders will be experimenting with it a little more this year.

And in the meantime, you can know that - provided you’re singing next to a voice which works well with yours - you’re absolutely right to suspect that perhaps you sing better when you’re at choir. It’s not just because we’re on your case about your technique - it’s the group singing effect!