ProfessorHelen Mitchell

Helen Mitchell has a multidisciplinary background in music, as a singer, music scholar and music performance researcher and her research is situated at the intersection between music practice and scientific discovery. She graduated in music from the University of Oxford in 2000 and moved to Sydney to undertake doctoral studies at the Conservatorium of Music in 2001. From 2004-5, she was Dean of Students at The Women’s College within the University of Sydney.

Listeners’ perception of sound quality is central to Helen's music performance research. Her PhD research defined and examined a major pedagogic singing technique, the “open throat”, by matching expert pedagogues’ descriptions and perceptions of sound quality to established acoustic measures of voices. A series of studies confirmed that listeners were the most effective and reliable assessors of sound quality but also suggested that current acoustic methods were limited in defining vocal quality.

From 2005, Helen was Australian Postdoctoral Fellow in an ARC funded study and conducted a longitudinal study of music training, tracking singers through the duration of a tertiary degree and mapped perceptual and acoustic changes in their vocal quality to their acquisition of technical mastery.

Her current work investigates how listeners recognise and describe individual performers’ sound identities. She first examined the impact of verbal overshadowing on listeners’ perception of performers. Two studies confirmed that the act of verbal description, or putting a sound “into words”, is not only essentially uninformative, but actually distorts listeners’ memory and subsequent recall of the original performer (Mitchell & MacDonald 2011; 2012). Results also indicated that listeners are surprising unreliable at recognising individual performers by sound alone. She is now investigating how listeners ‘hear’ music performers to see to what extent audiences integrate audio and visual information to identify individual performers (Mitchell & MacDonald in press; in review).

At SCM, Helen convenes Postgraduate and Honours Research Methods courses and takes graduate seminars in empirical music studies and research ethics. She is Performance Honours Coordinator and also supervises Honours, Masters, DMA and PhD students in their research projects in music performance.