ABSTRACT
From infancy to senior years, singing provides human beings the opportunity for making music. Typically combining music and text, singing engages mental capacities underlying both music and speech production and perception. While many adults sing from time to time, and some belong to choirs, often they prefer to listen to professional performers like Adele or Bruno Mars in the pop world, or Renee Fleming or Plácido Domingo in the classical realm. This chapter reviews aspects of the development of singing as both an ordinary capacity as well as an extraordinary skill of the professional musician. Recent neuroscience research is reviewed with a focus on how the brain adapts to the complexity of dealing with text and melody. The benefits of choral singing for group cohesion and community-building are reviewed as are the benefits of singing in early life for pre-literacy skills, and for the amelioration of certain language disorders. The chapter ends with suggestions for future acceleration of understanding in this somewhat neglected but fruitful area of music psychology.
