Group singing is globally dominant and associated with social context

Abstract

Music is an interactive technology associated with religious rituals and communal events, and is suggested to have evolved as a participatory activity supporting social bonding. In post-industrial societies, however, music’s communal role was eclipsed by its relatively passive consumption by audiences disconnected from performers. It was suggested that as societies became larger and more differentiated, music became less participatory and more focused on professional performers and solo singing. Here, we consider the prevalence of group singing and several hypotheses about its relationship to social organization through the analysis of two global song corpora: 5,776 coded audio recordings from 1,024 societies, and 4,709 coded ethnographic texts from 60 societies. We find that in both corpora, group singing is more common than solo singing overall and in most societies. Group singing prevalence depends not only on sociopolitical complexity — with greater emphasis on soloists associated with increased social differentiation — but also on regional variation and on the social context of the performance, with group singing more likely during religious rituals, and solo singing more likely in the context of healing and mourning. Overall, our findings provide further support for the interactive nature of music and its complex relationship with social organization.

The Exceptions and the Rules in global musical diversity

“…But our analysis of unusualness of traditional folk songs is only one way of measuring musical variation. Other research has shown the importance of factors such as genre, age, gender, class, musical training, language, and many other factors (Lomax, 1968;Mehr et al, 2019;Nettl, 2015;Ozaki et al, Submitted;Shilton et al, 2022). Next steps in understanding musical evolution could incorporate and compare the effects of style, context, and other factors in cross-cultural musical diversity.…”