How do listeners perceive emotional genuineness in musical theatre performers, and how might this help to inform the pedagogy of acting through song?

One of the challenges of Musical Theatre training is the integration of disciplines. When it comes to Acting Through Song (ATS), there can be complaints of emotion interfering with vocal performance or vocal health, or conversely, the prioritising of vocal technique above truthful acting. Study of vocal emotion expression in singing is comparatively new, unlike vocal emotion expression in speech. Those studies that have been undertaken have been primarily focussed on the acoustic elements. This study foregrounded listener perceptions and how they might inform an outside-in approach to vocal emotion expression in singing and ATS pedagogy, specifically in the genre of Musical Theatre. Previous studies have largely centred on the accuracy of decoding of emotion, or on features of discrete emotions, rather than exploring the underlying mechanisms that convey emotions to others. This study placed an emphasis on how the decoder identifies emotional singing, leading to a deeper understanding of the features that listeners associate with emotion, prioritising the emotion of the audience rather than the performer. Thematic analysis of listener perceptions yielded results that, once analysed alongside literature from previous studies, created a series of practical suggestions that could be used by singing teachers working with emotional Musical Theatre performance.