About

The Program

The MFA in Vocal Pedagogy prepares singer-teachers to integrate voice science, pedagogical history, and reflective teaching practice. Students complete original thesis research as the capstone of their degree — designing studies, collecting data, and producing work that contributes to the field.

Research Supervision

MFA thesis students are supervised through a three-semester sequence (MFA Thesis I, II, III) that moves from question formation and literature review through methodology, data collection, analysis, and defense.

Research in this program spans a wide range of methodologies:

• Acoustic analysis — spectral measures, voice quality indices, pre/post comparisons
• Physiological monitoring — heart rate, respiratory measures, real-time biofeedback
• Perceptual evaluation — expert listener ratings, standardized scales
• Survey and interview — validated instruments, qualitative coding
• Mixed methods — combining physiological, acoustic, and self-report data

This Archive

The research archive is built with Quarto and uses Plotly for interactive figures. All analysis notebooks are rendered with code hidden — the focus is on the data, the figures, and the interpretation.

Analysis pipelines are written in Python. Source code and raw data are maintained separately in the program’s working repository.

Faculty

K. Gautereaux — Principal Investigator and thesis supervisor. Teaches History of Vocal Pedagogy, Structure and Function of the Singing Mechanism, and the Vocal Pedagogy Colloquium.