Tony Tierney reports on the efforts of boffins to resolve the battle of the sexes being fought in cathedral choirs.

SOUND boffins at York University have been trying to help resolve a long-running battle of the singing sexes.

When cathedrals opened their doors to girl choristers a few years ago, many church music lovers were aghast.

They argued that girls were unable to produce a sound in keeping with the musical traditions of the choral-sung divine offices - songs of worship.

Many cathedrals, including York Minster, allow girls to sing in this traditionally male-dominated arena.

Now research carried out in the University's Department of Electronics by Professor David Howard, Dr John Szymanski and Chris Barlow, of the Music Technology Research Group, is contributing to the debate.

Working with Professor Graham Welch, of the Roehampton Institute, their study aims to discover whether the difference between trained girl and boy choristers can be determined reliably by listeners, and if there are measurable voice production differences between the sexes.

In their first experiment, researchers used two CD recordings of Wells Cathedral Choir, identical in every respect but the top line, in which one was sung by boys and others by girls.

A group of 189 male and female listeners were asked to identify the gender of the singers in each case.

The results indicate that, on average, listeners are able to discriminate between the two. But on average only 12.1 of the 20 tracks were identified correctly.

All listeners were better at identifying the boys than the girls, although adults were better at this task than children and girl listeners were better than boy listeners.

"Perhaps this is due to the cathedral tradition of all male choirs which almost all listeners will be familiar with, even if it is only through listening to broadcasts of large state occasions such as royal weddings, state funerals or carols from King's," said Prof Howard.

An ongoing project is recording the individual voices of choristers and non-trained boys.

Recordings have so far been made of more than 150 choristers from cathedral choirs including Ripon; Wells; St Paul's, London; Blackburn; and Sheffield.

The results of this experiment, in which a microphone and voice source monitor are placed on the young singer's neck, indicate there is evidence of a difference between boy and girl choristers.

But it remains a matter of opinion whether one sounds sweeter than the other.