Can you think of the last time you left your choir rehearsal feeling happier than when you arrived?

This week is all about the Psychological  #BenefitsOfSinging! Collective singing works and contributes to individual identity,  improves inter - and intrapersonal communication, and can be an outlet for our emotions! Regardless of how you’re feeling, whether angry, sad, or happy, we empower you to sing.  Don’t hold it in, sing it out!

Collective singing is beneficial in a variety of ways! We’ve found research to support the fact that group singing encourages the development of individual identity and improves inter-and intrapersonal communication. More than that, singing is an outlet for our feelings. Group singing contributes to growth and skills such as responsibility, the art of practice, resilience and working hard, listening, proactivity, adherence to your group, confidence, and working for what you love. These skills you acquire go beyond the choir practice into your day-to-day life, making you a better member of society!

The facts are right here: Collective singing has a positive impact on developing our own identity, and beyond that, it strengthens our communication skills and helps positively release our feelings.

Improved intra- and interpersonel communication

This chapter examines the growing evidence for musical communication as integral to human vocalization and emotional expression. Human vocalization contains key essences of our musical development and fosters our earliest abilities to communicate musically. Speech melodies are the first linguistic elements experienced and mastered and are indistinguishable from the melodic precursors of singing as essential elements in intra- and inter-personal musical communication. Singing as communication originates in vocal pitch contours whose musical intervals are exploited by caregivers in an infant-directed speech to foster language development.
Similar, but more explicit, features are evidenced in caregivers’ infant-directed singing, such as in lullabies and play songs. These basic musical elements of communication can be perceived in utero and underpin the infant’s subsequent vocalizations and musical behaviours. Additionally, the underlying integration of emotion with perception and cognition generates a network of linked vocal and emotional behaviours that are central to human communication.

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Development of individual identity through music

This study makes a new contribution by exploring adolescent girls’ perceptions of singing as compared with those of boys. Through an inductive, two-phase research design, the language of the students themselves is used to describe their perceptions of singing.
The roles of motivation, confidence, self-efficacy, and autonomy come through as strong influences on the students’ enjoyment of singing. Boys tend to exhibit static ability evaluations in this age group and demonstrate a lack of cognitive understanding of their changing voices. Girls, however, recognise that effort, ability, and confidence interact in different ways depending on the social context for their singing. Recommendations for teachers are made, that could challenge some of the boys’ fixed views of their vocal abilities, and strengthen the appeal of group singing for all adolescents.

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Singing is an outlet for your feelings

This study explores the effects of group singing on the mood of singers. Participants (aged 18-73 years), a community sample of volunteers, were randomly assigned to either a singing (experimental) or a listening to singing (control) group. The singers participated in a half-hour session of singing while the listeners sat and listened to the singing group.
The Profile of Mood States Questionnaire (P.O.M.S.) was administered immediately before and after the singing session and again 1 week later. Multivariate analyses of variance (MANOVA; 3x2 factorial with 3 levels of time and 2 levels of the group) were conducted on each of the P.O.M.S. subscales. Multivariate F tests indicated that significant changes occurred on the P.O.M.S. sub-scales (tension, anger, fatigue, vigour, and confusion) for both the singing and listening groups over time. No significant group-time interactions were indicating that both groups responded similarly to the singing session, although the effects for singing were more robust. The results of this study indicate that both singing and listening to singing can alter mood immediately after participation in a short singing session and that some of these effects were evident in the P.O.M.S. scores 1 week later.

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• Campaign Graphics
• Campaign Graphical Elements
• Curated research
• An FAQ document on Advocacy
• and more

Translate the campaign contents

This way the message will come across more easily. New languages will be added to our website as soon as they are made available.

Link your own content to the campaign

Do you have your own pictures/videos showcasing the benefits of collective singing either through a previous event, an interview, a documentary series? Link them to the campaign.

Multiply and reach out

In order to reach as many people as possible, we would encourage you to multiply the messages of the campaign in your country during the campaign run. 

Interact and use the #BenefitsOfSinging hashtag

Use the #BenefitsOfSinging hashtag when tweeting, posting, and sharing any posts about the campaign.