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Group Emotions and Crowd Singing
Language and music make it possible for individuals to bond into large, cooperative groups. Extensive research findings strongly indicate music promotes and coordinates group bonding, cooperation, and social cohesion:
- Everybody’s a performer. In most hunter-gatherer societies, everyone participates in music—no one’s an audience member. As well, dancing nearly always accompanies music making.
- Group emotional arousal. Music causes a state of general emotional arousal in all the members of a group simultaneously. So music has always served well in situations involving more than one person and ritual: marriages, funerals, groups marching, religious ceremonies.
- Solidarity through emotional synchrony. Being able to keep a steady beat and sing to it would increase evolutionary fitness by enabling larger and larger social groups to participate as a single, coordinated entity, increasing solidarity and camaraderie through emotional synchrony. Music has the effect of imposing order and structure on time. At an event featuring music, everyone experiences the same feeling at the same time. Some examples in various cultures today:
- Crowd singing at popular music concerts
- Congregational hymn singing
- Singing of solidarity songs on picket lines
- Karaoke singing
- “Happy Birthday,” sung at social gatherings millions of times a year
- Campfire singing (except by outlaws on the lam)
- National anthem singing
- Crowd singing at sports events such as British football matches and ice hockey games