408), while more complex forms of ‘musicking’ Footnote 1 (Small 1998)-such as participating in and performing music-activate a wide range of interconnected effects, benefits, meanings and significances. Even more passive experiences such as musical listening ‘occur in a complex interplay between the listener, the music, and the context’ (Västfjäll et al. Music might be thought of as a polyvalent system, in that its meaning and value can be expressed in a diverse set of complementary dimensions. Focusing on participant experience provides a way of illuminating this complex interdependence, helping to ground scientific knowledge in the complex reality of people’s lived experiences. A comprehensive understanding of any single dimension of the wellbeing effect of group singing is confounded by its many other variable dimensions, and controlling for these variables becomes harder to do as the increasing complexity of their interdependence emerges. Perhaps the reason this ‘something else’ eludes comprehension is because the benefits of group singing consist of a set of interdependencies that might be thought of as an ‘adaptive complex’, i.e., where ‘the functional significance of each characteristic is amplified by the others’ (Whiten 2007, p. The recent NICE report on group singing and older people suggests: ‘the committee… noted that it is unclear whether it is the singing itself that produces the benefit, the group-based nature of the activity or something else (NICE 2015, p. 2015) a detailed understanding of these complex benefits are still emerging.
While ‘participation in singing groups confers significant benefits in terms of mental aspects of quality of life’ (Coulton et al. This approach enhances a more scientific understanding of the natural processes involved, illuminating the complex ways in which group singing might produce its benefits, and highlighting some of its essential characteristics. 10) through an analysis of their experiences.
This article contributes to such discussion by further illustrating the importance of representing participants’ personal perspectives of group singing (Dingle et al.
2019), which have broad appeal to a wide public (Eno 2008 Burkeman 2015). 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.Ī significant body of evidence points to the positive health and wellbeing benefits associated with group singing (Skingley and Bungay 2010 Clift 2013 Coulton et al. 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. 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. 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. 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. 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’. 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). 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. 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. A growing body of evidence points to a wide range of benefits arising from participation in group singing.
0 kommentar(er)
