Article Title: Why the community that sings together stays together

Article Summary

The article at issue sheds light on some conclusive findings supporting the fact that music has the power to bond people socially. The article starts with a scene from the film Queen, which shows a large number of people performing very emotionally and emphatically along with the eponymous band. Intrigued by how a shared performance of music brought so many people close to each other, the author, with some colleagues, tried to research whether music actually bonded human groups universally. What grooming sessions served for our less evolutionarily developed ancestors like monkeys, shared music performances seem to do for humans. This was found from several social experiments the author conducted. The members of a large group who did not know each other initially felt closer to the other members after a shared singing exercise together. Singing also hastened the bonding process between people when compared to other social activities like painting or writing together. When pitted to sing competitively against each other, a team’s members grew apart, but when singing competitively but simultaneously against members of a rival team, members of both team felt closer to the other, demonstrating music’s “ice breaker effect”. Compared to social activities like laughing together, music can bond larger numbers of people instantaneously. Whether it is the physiological changes in the body during singing, or the emotional and commitment-oriented bodily changes during singing that brings people together is debatable – but the bonding effect music has is not, opines the author.