Vocal pedagogy is the study of the art and science of voice instruction. It is used in the teaching of singing and assists in defining what singing is, how singing works, and how singing technique is accomplished.

Vocal pedagogy covers a broad range of aspects of singing, ranging from the physiological process of vocal production to the artistic aspects of interpretation of songs from different genres or historical eras. Typical areas of study include:

All of these different concepts are a part of developing vocal technique. Not all voice teachers have the same opinions within every topic of study which causes variations in pedagogical approaches and vocal technique.

Within Western culture, the study of vocal pedagogy began in Ancient Greece. Scholars such as Alypius and Pythagoras studied and made observations on the art of singing. It is unclear, however, whether the Greeks ever developed a systematic approach to teaching singing as little writing on the subject survives today.

The first surviving record of a systematized approach to teaching singing was developed in the medieval monasteries of the Roman Catholic Church sometime near the beginning of the 13th century. As with other fields of study, the monasteries were the center of musical intellectual life during the medieval period and many men within the monasteries devoted their time to the study of music and the art of singing. Highly influential in the development of a vocal pedagogical system were monks Johannes de Garlandia and Jerome of Moravia who were the first to develop a concept of vocal registers. These men identified three registers: chest voice, throat voice, and head voice (pectoris, guttoris, and capitis). Their concept of head voice, however, is much more similar to the modern pedagogists understanding of the falsetto register. Other concepts discussed in the monastic system included vocal resonance, voice classification, breath support, diction, and tone quality to name a few. The ideas developed within the monastic system highly influenced the development of vocal pedagogy over the next several centuries including the Bel Canto style of singing.

With the onset of the Renaissance in the 15th century, the study of singing began to move outside of the church. The courts of rich patrons, such as the Dukes of Burgundy who supported the Burgundian School and the Franco-Flemish School, became secular centers of study for singing and all other areas of musical study. The vocal pedagogical methods taught in these schools, however, were based on the concepts developed within the monastic system. Many of the teachers within these schools had their initial musical training from singing in church choirs as children. The church also remained at the forefront of musical composition at this time and remained highly influential in shaping musical tastes and practices both in and outside the church. It was the Catholic Church that first popularized the use of castrato singers in the 16th century, which ultimately led to the popularity of castrato voices in Baroque and Classical operas.

While the church maintained its dominance on intellectual and cultural life, there are individual examples of writers on voice pedagogy from this period who were from outside the church who put forward new ways of thinking and talking about the art of singing; although they lacked the wider influence of the monastic writers. The physician and court singer Giovanni Camillo Maffei was the first writer on vocal pedagogy to incorporate knowledge of the physiology of the voice into a theory of singing in his treatise Discorso delta voce e del modo d'apparare di cantar di garganta, and Scala naturale, overo Fantasia dolcissima, intorno alle cose occulte e desiderate nella filosofia (Venice, 1564).

It was not until the development of opera in the 17th century that vocal pedagogy began to break away from some of the established thinking of the monastic writers and develop deeper understandings of the physical process of singing and its relation to key concepts like vocal registration and vocal resonation. It was also during this time that noted voice teachers began to emerge. Giulio Caccini is an example of an important early Italian voice teacher. In the late 17th century, the bel canto method of singing began to develop in Italy. This style of singing had a huge impact on the development of opera and the development of vocal pedagogy during the Classical and Romantic periods. It was during this time that teachers and composers first began to identify singers by and write roles for more specific voice types. However, it was not until the 19th century that more clearly defined voice classification systems like the German Fach system emerged. Within these systems, more descriptive terms were used in classifying voices such as coloratura soprano and lyric soprano.