Can you remember experiencing any educational benefits through collective singing?

This week is all about the Educational  #BenefitsOfSinging! Collective singing contributes to the musical potential in all of us! No matter if you consider yourself musical or not, singing is for everybody! Therefore, we animate you wholeheartedly to sing together!

Singing in a choir or a group benefits all of us socially, physically, psychologically, and even educationally! We’ve curated a list of research that supports the notion that collective singing improves reading skills,  stimulates intellectual engagement with music, and contributes to the ability to realize our musical potential. Singing is a powerful tool and equips us even educationally! 

The facts are right here:  Research confirms that reading lyrics and music is processed in the same neurocortical regions for symbol decoding and singing will make you more competent in your own language, including improved reading skills. Moreover, it stimulates intellectual engagement and can make us discover and realize our musical potential!

Improved reading skills

The study mentioned in this dissertation investigated the impact of singing-integrated reading instruction on the oral reading fluency and motivation of elementary students in an after-school program.

Participants were third graders (n = 29) who attended the singing-integrated oral reading fluency (SI ORF) intervention twice a week for eight weeks. Components of the intervention included teacher-modelling of fluent oral reading, oral support, repeated reading and singing activities from a variety of children’s literature, and individual free-time. The purpose of this study was to investigate the impact of singing-integrated (abbr. SI) instruction, with guided repeated oral reading (abbr. GROR) as a major instructional strategy, on the oral reading fluency and motivation of third-grade students in a metropolitan after-school programme.

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Reading lyrics and music are processed in the same neurocortical regions for symbol decoding

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, sThis 3-T fMRI study investigates brain regions similarly and differentially involved with listening and covert production of singing relative to speech.

Given the greater use of auditory–motorself-monitoring and imagery with respect to consonance in singing,brain regions involved with these processes are predicted to be differentially active for singing more than for speech. The stimuli consisted of six Japanese songs. A block design was employed in which the tasks for the subject were to listen passively to singing of the song lyrics, passively listen to speaking of the song lyrics, covertly sing the song lyrics visually presented, covertly speak the song lyrics visually presented, and to rest.

The conjunction of passive listening and covert production tasks used in this study allow for general neural processes underlying both perception and production to be discerned that are not exclusively a result of stimulus induced auditory processing nor to low level articulatory motor control such as in lullabies and play songs. Additionally, the underlying integration of emotion with perception and cognition generates a network of linked vocal and emotional behaviors that are central to human communication.

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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
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Translate the campaign contents

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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.