An innovative study says that listeners cannot tell if music is sung by choirs featuring male or female trebles. Choral music has been dominated by choirboys for centuries, with most choirs refusing to accept girls as choristers on the grounds that the young male voice has a unique quality that sets it apart.

Many experts, together with pressure groups such as the Campaign for the Defence of the Traditional Cathedral Choir, contend that choirboys, particularly older ones whose voice is close to breaking, sing with a particularly “rich” or “haunting” tone that girls cannot match. Most leading choirs have now agreed to take some girls, since the mother of a girl rejected without audition by Salisbury Cathedral won a legal challenge in 1991.

But while cathedrals generally have two choirs, with boys or girls taking the treble parts, the former is usually considered more prestigious. Professor David Howard of the University of York and Graham Welch of the Institute of Education in London recorded Wells Cathedral Choir performing identical evensongs over two evenings.

While the altos, tenors and basses were the same on each occasion, one performance featured boys singing the treble part, and the other girls. A group of 140 people with experience of choral music were asked to say if boys or girls were singing the top part in recorded extracts. They did no better than chance, picking the correct gender just 53 per cent of the time.

Choirmasters and choral music experts said they could still tell the difference, despite the the study’s conclusion. Adrian Lucas, Master of Choristers at Worcester Cathedral, said: “Boys and girls peak at different times, so it’s like comparing greyhound racing to horse racing.” Peter Quantrill, production editor of the classical music magazine Gramophone, said: “Both work in entirely different ways. Saying that their voices make indistinguishable sounds is very dubious.”

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