Mission Statement

The ICTMD Study Group on Voice Research Across Musical Traditions is dedicated to advancing a rigorous, inclusive, and globally grounded understanding of the singing voice in musical performance across diverse cultural traditions as a primary medium of artistic expression, cultural transmission, and social meaning. The Study Group positions the voice not merely as a technical or physiological phenomenon, but as a culturally embedded, historically situated, and socially mediated practice through which communities articulate identity, memory, and aesthetic values.

Our mission is to cultivate sustained, critically informed interdisciplinary exchange among scholars, practitioners, and institutions engaged in the study of singing and vocal traditions worldwide. Integrating perspectives from musicology and ethnomusicology with vocal pedagogy, voice science, medicine, pedagogical vocology, acoustics, psychology, and anthropology, the Study Group advances research frameworks that link embodied vocal practice, scientific analysis, and cultural interpretation. We aim to establish an intellectual platform in which practitioner-based, oral, and Indigenous knowledge systems are engaged in productive dialogue with empirical, clinical, and notational methodologies, allowing multiple ways of knowing the voice to be examined within a coherent and analytically rigorous scholarly field.

A central aim of the Study Group is to support comparative, historically informed, and ethically grounded research on vocal practices as living heritage. This includes attention to processes of transmission, innovation, standardisation, and marginalisation, as well as to questions of vocal health, sustainability, and pedagogy in different sociocultural settings. In doing so, the Study Group contributes to broader ICTMD goals of cultural diversity, equity, and the safeguarding of intangible cultural heritage.

By situating the voice at the centre of interdisciplinary inquiry, we aim to deepen global understanding of how vocal traditions shape and are shaped by human experience across musical cultures.

Chair: Alexandria Sultan von Bruseldorff

Azerbaijan National Conservatory
Baku
Azerbaijan

E-Mail: alexandriasultan@outlook.com  
Website: TBA

Vice-Chair: TBA

Secretary: TBA