Girls' singing voices 'are just as pure as boys'

Claims that girls' choirs are less pure than boys' have been demolished by a scientific listening test which showed that people cannot tell the difference between the sexes.

But sexism in the Anglican church may still keep girls and boys separate in cathedral choirs, Professor David Howard, who investigated the differences in tone, said at Salford University yesterday.

"It has been a tradition for 500 years that boys sing in cathedral choirs but girls don't," Professor Howard who works in the electronics department of the University of York said. In the 1990s, Anglican cathedrals opened up choirs to girls because of a law suit, but kept them separate because their voices were deemed to be "less pure" than boys'.

Professor Howard said: "The claim is that boys have a purer sound, that girls' voices are huskier. While that might perhaps be true for individuals, it is not borne out chorally, where the voices all blend together. I believe this argument is primarily sexist - it has got nothing to do with music."

Yet claims that girls' voices are inferior are common: one website, entitled "Campaign for the Defence of the Traditional Cathedral Choir", says that the inclusion of girls in church choirs means "our cathedral music... [will be] brought to a ruin even the Reformation never managed to achieve". The site carries an article claiming that boys' and girls' voices are not indistinguishable - and that girls' voices are inferior. Professor Howard decided to test this by taking samples of commercial recordings of two choirs, one with boys and one with girls, which sing at Wells Cathedral in Somerset.

Initial tests found that only 60 per cent of people could tell the difference between the choir with girls and that with boys. But he felt the results were not conclusive because the two groups had not been singing the same repertoire.

When he conducted his study with both choirs singing the same pieces in recordings he made himself on successive nights, he found that people could not tell the difference: on average they did only as well as random guessing. "Girls can do the job as well as boys," he said.

Professor Howard is carrying out a long-term study, comparing the way girls' and boys' voices change as they mature. "In girls, the voice seems to mature at about 16 - but the trouble is that they're dropped from choirs at 14, the same as the boys. It might be that any difference in solo singers goes away after 14, but we can't find out."