Short Courses & Events / Archive

Babies responding to song: Insights from developmental science

Thursday 26th September 2024, 5:00 PM - 7:00 PM (London Time)

Around the world, parents and other family members sing to babies. Song can be an important avenue for cultural transmission, and a functional parenting tool for soothing infants to sleep, engaging them in play, or cheering them up if they are distressed.

In this lecture, Laura will review research exploring why and how parents sing to infants, and how infants respond to song. These studies use mixed methods, including parent questionnaire,  acoustic analyses, physiological recordings, and behavioural analyses. These studies reveal that from very early in life, song can help us regulate our emotions and connect with those around us. These early experiences with our first musical mentors may lay the foundation for a lifetime of musical listening – indeed, parents who sing most frequently to their children also report having been sung to by their own parents in their youth. You will end by discussing the ways that these empirical results can inform early musical programming, perhaps especially for families with reduced support.

🏷️ Price £30 (UK VAT inclusive)
🎥 Recording automatically sent to all who book (even if you cannot attend live)
▶️ Rewatch as many times as you like
📜 Certificate of attendance available

Dr. Laura Cirelli

Dr. Laura Cirelli is an Assistant Professor in the Psychology Department at the University of Toronto Scarborough and the director of the TEMPO lab (timing, entrainment, & music perception).

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Attend this course for as little as £22 as part of the Voice Professional Training CPD Award Scheme.

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Sorry, this is an archived short course...

We have plenty of upcoming short courses coming soon. See details of some of them below or look at the full list of short courses.

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2:00 PM - 4:00 PM
(London Time)

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Thursday 4th December 2025
5:00 PM - 7:00 PM
(London Time)

(R)evolutionary Voice Training: harnessing human instinct to accelerate vocal transformation!

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Human beings and our vertebrate ancestors have been communicating via vocalization for millions of years – those sounds did not start as complex language, but as animal mimicry, acoustic cuing, and emotional primal sounds. Join Maddie Tarbox for this two hour session as she unpicks the repertoire of instinctive shortcuts that can lower cognitive load and accelerate vocal change!

Low Male Voices (LMVs): Development, Technique, and Repertoire
Tuesday 9th December 2025
5:00 PM - 7:00 PM
(London Time)

Low Male Voices (LMVs): Development, Technique, and Repertoire

Dr Dann Mitton

Join Dr Dann Mitton for this two hour workshop where he explores the Development, Techniques, and Repertoire favoured for Low Male Voices (LMVs). Typically labelled as 'Bass' and 'Baritone', these classifications are used in classical music, choral settings, and vocal pedagogy to help determine suitable repertoire and vocal roles. In contemporary music, the distinctions are less rigid but still useful for understanding vocal range and timbre.