Group singing as a resource for the development of a healthy public: a study of adult group singing

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 and reflective 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.

The digital ‘turn’ in music education (editorial)

“…The experience of convergence within the field of music over the last twenty years might have been more apparent within its performance domains, with the boundaries between presentational performance or the 'performance of works' and participatory performance or the 'performance of relationships' (Camlin in pressa;in pressc;Camlin, Boyce-Tillman, and Hendricks in press;Camlin, Daffern, and Zeserson 2020) increasingly blurred and contested, as evidenced by the rise of disciplines such as community music (CM), music, health and wellbeing and the social impact of music-making (SIMM) as subjects within the academy. What many of the articles in this collection point to is also an accelerated convergence with recorded fields of music as wellthe use of high fidelity and studio audio art as increasingly essential elements of an online music education practice.…”

“…We should also perhaps take comfort from the assumption that as well as providing the potential for metaphorical recovery in the way that it offers opportunities to experience particular social realities which may differ from those of everyday life, music making offers us a more literal potential for 'mutual recovery' (Camlin, Daffern, and Zeserson 2020) through the way in which our neurobiology may come to resonate with that of others through the act of musical entrainment (Camlin in press). As Schiavio et al highlight, 'online collaborations, dialogue, and open communication among students may not be enough when compared to the live presence of others', and it is to the re-emergence of face-to-face 'music(k)ing' that we must surely now turn with hope.…”

Singing Together, Yet Apart: The Experience of UK Choir Members and Facilitators During the Covid-19 Pandemic

“…This links to her earlier work exploring the process of group singing as a form of communitas ( Specker, 2014 ) and Turino’s definition of “sonic bonding” ( Turino, 2008 ) whereby the physical coordination of music-making creates this social cohesion. Considering group singing as a complex adaptive system and the social bonding which that affords, Camlin et al (2020) discuss group singing as a form of “healthy public,” drawing on participant stories of a community singing project to try to capture the multidimensionality of participants’ experiences.…”

Heart's Ease: Eudaimonia, Musicking in the Pandemic, and Its Implications for Music Education

“…As social prescribing (Walker and Boyce-Tillman, 2002 ) develops in the UK, musicking can provide wholeness in a fragmented society (Storr, 1993 ; Hinchliffe et al, 2018 ). It can rebalance a highly individualised health system and contribute to the reestablishment of a nurturing community (Crawford et al, 2013 : 137–152; Morgan and Boyce-Tillman, 2016 ; Camlin et al, 2020 ). Group musicking has become very difficult in the pandemic; people have felt deeply impoverished by the loss of the sacred initiated by singing together.…”