Projects per year
Abstract
A growing body of evidence points to a wide range of benefits arising from
participation in group singing. Group singing requires participants to engage with
each other in a simultaneous musical dialogue in a pluralistic and emergent context,
creating a coherent cultural expression through the reflexive negotiation of (musical)
meaning manifest in the collective power of the human voice. As such, group singing
might be taken – both literally and figuratively – as a potent form of ‘healthy public’,
creating an ‘ideal’ community which participants can subsequently mobilise as a
positive resource for everyday life.
The experiences of a group of singers (n=78) who had participated in an outdoor
singing project were collected and analysed using a three-layer research design
consisting of: distributed data generation and interpretation, considered against
comparative data from other singing groups (n=88); a focus group workshop (n=11);
an unstructured interview (n=2). The study confirmed an expected perception of the
social bonding effect of group singing, highlighting affordances for interpersonal
attunement and attachment alongside a powerful individual sense of feeling ‘uplifted’.
This study presents a novel perspective on group singing, highlighting the
importance of participant experience as a means of understanding music as a
holistic and complex adaptive system. It validates findings about group singing from
previous studies - in particular the stability of the social bonding effect as a less
variant characteristic in the face of environmental and other situational influences,
alongside its capacity for mental health recovery. It establishes a subjective
sociocultural and musical understanding of group singing, by expanding on these
findings to centralise the importance of individual experience, and the consciousness
of that experience as descriptive self-awareness. The ways in which participants
describe and discuss their experiences of group singing and its benefits points to a
complex interdependence between a number of musical, neurobiological and
psychosocial mechanisms which might be independently and objectively analysed.
An emerging theory is that at least some of the potency of group singing is as a
resource where people can rehearse and perform ‘healthy’ relationships, further
emphasising its potential as a resource for healthy publics.
participation in group singing. Group singing requires participants to engage with
each other in a simultaneous musical dialogue in a pluralistic and emergent context,
creating a coherent cultural expression through the reflexive negotiation of (musical)
meaning manifest in the collective power of the human voice. As such, group singing
might be taken – both literally and figuratively – as a potent form of ‘healthy public’,
creating an ‘ideal’ community which participants can subsequently mobilise as a
positive resource for everyday life.
The experiences of a group of singers (n=78) who had participated in an outdoor
singing project were collected and analysed using a three-layer research design
consisting of: distributed data generation and interpretation, considered against
comparative data from other singing groups (n=88); a focus group workshop (n=11);
an unstructured interview (n=2). The study confirmed an expected perception of the
social bonding effect of group singing, highlighting affordances for interpersonal
attunement and attachment alongside a powerful individual sense of feeling ‘uplifted’.
This study presents a novel perspective on group singing, highlighting the
importance of participant experience as a means of understanding music as a
holistic and complex adaptive system. It validates findings about group singing from
previous studies - in particular the stability of the social bonding effect as a less
variant characteristic in the face of environmental and other situational influences,
alongside its capacity for mental health recovery. It establishes a subjective
sociocultural and musical understanding of group singing, by expanding on these
findings to centralise the importance of individual experience, and the consciousness
of that experience as descriptive self-awareness. The ways in which participants
describe and discuss their experiences of group singing and its benefits points to a
complex interdependence between a number of musical, neurobiological and
psychosocial mechanisms which might be independently and objectively analysed.
An emerging theory is that at least some of the potency of group singing is as a
resource where people can rehearse and perform ‘healthy’ relationships, further
emphasising its potential as a resource for healthy publics.
| Original language | English |
|---|---|
| Pages (from-to) | 1-15 |
| Number of pages | 15 |
| Journal | Humanities and Social Sciences Communications |
| Volume | 7 |
| Issue number | 60 |
| Early online date | 5 Aug 2020 |
| DOIs | |
| Publication status | E-pub ahead of print - 5 Aug 2020 |
Bibliographical note
© The Author(s) 2020Keywords
- singing
- choirs
- healthy publics
Projects
- 1 Finished
-
The hills are alive: combining the benefits of natural environments and group singing through immersive experiences
1/03/18 → 10/10/18
Project: Research project (funded) › Research