Her early, formative singing experience, was influenced by the Bulgarian choir's technique. Gerrard's influences on the language she sings since her youth has been exerted mainly by the conversations and the music she heard in the Melbourne area where she had grown up, where a large Greco-Turkish community lived. Gerrard's first musical influences came from her father, as she grew up listening to Sean Nós songs in an Irish family, and also the "abstract forms" with which Antonin Artaud worked that she heard on radio documentaries.