Dr. Crystal Sellers, assistant professor of music at Bluffton University, will look at "Gospel vs. Classical: Vocally Speaking" in a Bluffton Colloquium at 4 p.m. Friday, March 18, in Stutzman Lecture Hall in Centennial Hall.

Free and open to the public, Sellers' presentation is also a report on summer 2010 research funded with the help of a Bluffton University Research Center grant. She has studied what occurs anatomically while a person is singing gospel music and compared it to findings already established for classical singing. She will be writing an article for submission to the Journal of Singing, the publication of the National Association of Teachers of Singing.

The organizer of Bluffton's new campus/community gospel choir, Sellers has earned three degrees in music performance-a bachelor's degree from Bowling Green State University, a master's degree from Roosevelt University in Chicago and a doctorate from The Ohio State University. In addition to continuing her doctoral research on developing a healthy singing method for gospel singers, the Columbus, Ohio, native is working on a textbook on the teaching of gospel singing.

"My goal with this research is to find scientific ways to approach teaching of singing for both gospel experts and non-experts alike," Sellers said.