In rhythmic choral speech, all speakers produce the same phonetic message at the same rate. A recording of such speech can be viewed as an algebraic summation in which speaker dependent variability is essentially reduced to the level of background noise. Intelligibility tests and acoustic analyses will be done on recordings of a large group of speakers producing short phrases containing stressed vowels in CVC syllables. The results will be considered in light of two competing theories of perceptual normalization; Kuhn [J. Acoust. Soc. Am.58, 428–433 (1975)] which suggests that front cavity information is invariant across speakers; and the standard formant ratio hypothesis. Preliminary data from a mixed chorus of 30 members indicates that intelligibility is maintained for phrase length utterances, and further that several consonants and most vowels are readily perceptible, even in excised syllables.