Susan Knight
Lena Ekman Frisk
Philippe Rixhon

Susan Knight, Lena Ekman Frisk and Philippe Rixhon share their research and efforts toward promoting singing, on both individual and global levels. Susan Knight describes her workshops for adult “non-singers” who wish to find their voices after having been discouraged from singing at a young age. Lena Ekman Frisk provides an overview of choirs with unusual participants in Sweden, such as workplace choirs, choirs in prisons, and choirs for children who do not show aptitude for singing. Additionally, she showed footage from a singing reality television show, The Singing Neighborhood, in which she auditioned and conducted a group of non-singers towards a public performance with orchestra. Unlike most reality TV, this program strove to be inclusive of their participants and to involve the surrounding community. The Aarya Foundation, founded by Philippe Rixhon, seeks to promote singing around the world through political advocacy. The Foundation’s thirty-year plan involves finding scientific evidence of the positive effects of singing, and then using this research to convince national education programs to include singing in their curricula.