We all know the many health benefits of singing together.
But did you know it’s also an excellent way of bonding a group of people together, even if you don’t know them?
My partner and I have just started line dancing classes. It’s fun, but there’s a distinct feeling of everyone being on their own, even though we’re all dancing the same steps at the same time.
There are opportunities in the (very short!) breaks to talk to people and to get to know them, but it’s hard to go up to a stranger to chat when you know you’ve only got two minutes. So people tend to stay in their little friendship bubbles.
When I compare this to my experience of choirs, the difference is huge.
There was a research paper published in 2015 called The ice-breaker effect: singing mediates fast social bonding. The research showed that “compared with individuals participating in craft or creative writing classes, singers experience a greater increase in both self-reported closeness to their group and positive affect.”
Even though “the non-singing classes provided more opportunity than the singing classes for talking to each other, [they] lacked a powerful means of bonding a whole class simultaneously.”
It takes time to make friends, but singing together “may be able to kick start this process in humans: singing breaks the ice so that individuals feel closer to the group as a whole even if they do not yet know anything about the individual members.”
The final conclusion of the research is that “the capacity of singing to bond groups of relative strangers in humans may have played a crucial role in allowing modern humans to create and maintain much larger social networks than their evolutionary relatives, which in turn may have facilitated the colonization of risky environments across the globe.”
Chris Rowbury
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