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Research & Evidence
The Power of Singing Together
Reconnecting to an essential human practice
For as long as humans have gathered together, we have sung together. Across cultures and throughout history, people have used voice, rhythm and song to celebrate life, grieve death, worship, endure hardship, bring about change, and create community.
We communicate with sound before we learn words. Babies cry, coo and play with pitch and rhythm to connect with us. We answer with rocking, humming and sing-song speech. As adults, we still sigh when we’re overwhelmed, hum while we work, cry out in pain, sing to ourselves, and wail when words can’t contain what we’re feeling.
Voice, rhythm and song can help us regulate, connect, express ourselves and share experience. They draw on resources we always carry with us — breath, voice, rhythm and vibration.
But somehow in our culture today, so many of us have stopped singing. Some of us stopped when someone told us we couldn’t sing. Others grew up and couldn’t find how singing fit into adult life. It became something children do, or professionals do — something we listen to rather than something we make ourselves.
We became passive consumers of music instead of active, connected co-creators. Community singing offers an easy, joyful way to reclaim our voices and reconnect with ourselves and each other through song.
What is community singing?
The kind of community singing we practise is rooted in the oral tradition.
We sit in a circle rather than facing a stage or conductor. Songs are short and taught by ear: a songleader offers a phrase, the group echoes it back, and we repeat.
There is:
- no audition
- no sheet music
- no lyrics to read
- no repertoire you are expected to know
- no performance we are rehearsing toward
A simple melody may gradually grow into rhythm, movement, layers and harmony. Because the song repeats, we need to think about it less and less. We can begin listening differently — to our own voice, to the people around us, and to the sound the group is creating together.
The goal is not to make the best possible version of a song. The experience of making it together is the point.
Why this form of singing?
Not every musical experience asks the same things of us.
Community singing has some unusual qualities that make it particularly useful in community, health and wellbeing settings.
It is low-barrier
People can participate without reading music, knowing the songs, speaking fluent English, identifying themselves as singers, or needing a particular level of physical ability.
You can sing wholeheartedly, sing softly, hum, move, listen, breathe with the group, or shift between those things.
There are many ways into the circle.
Everyone is a participant
There is no division between performer and audience. The music only exists because the people in the room are making it together.
That move from consumer to participant is central to what interests us about this work.
It asks us to listen
Singing with other people is not only about producing sound. We adjust to one another.
We hear another voice and respond. We find a rhythm together. Our own contribution becomes part of something larger without disappearing inside it.
It involves the whole person
Singing combines breath, vibration, rhythm, listening, memory, emotion and often movement.
We are not only talking about connection or thinking about how we feel. We are doing something together with our bodies.
It does not depend on conversation
Sometimes words are exactly what we need. Sometimes they are tiring, inaccessible, insufficient, or simply not the way someone wants to participate.
A song allows people to share an experience without requiring explanation or personal disclosure.
That can be especially useful in groups where people have different first languages, in grief and caregiving settings, or whenever there is already a lot to carry.
Repetition changes the experience
In the beginning, we are learning the song. After a while, we know it. The thinking effort drops away and the repetition itself can become absorbing — closer to meditation than rehearsal.
There is no destination we are trying to reach. We are singing for the experience happening now.
So what is happening when we sing together?
Humans did not wait for randomized controlled trials before they were moved to sing at births, funerals, vigils, celebrations and around fires.
We don’t need a saliva sample to know that being part of a room full of voices can feel different from listening to a recording.
Still, the research is fascinating and empowering. Science is beginning to give us ways of observing and measuring some of the processes that may help explain why communal singing has remained such a persistent human practice.
Researchers are studying group singing in relation to:
- social bonding
- mood
- stress and cortisol
- oxytocin
- pain tolerance
- breathing and heart-rate patterns
- mental health
- communication
- loneliness and social connection
And some of the findings are striking.
The group seems to be part of the medicine
One particularly interesting question is whether the benefits come simply from singing, or from singing with other people.
Researchers with Toronto’s SingWell project compared singing alone with singing in a group. Both conditions were associated with reductions in cortisol. But group singing increased mood and oxytocin while individual singing did not. Changes in oxytocin were also associated with the changes in mood.
That suggests that some of what happens when we sing may come specifically from its social dimension.
SingWell has since investigated group singing across a range of health and communication contexts, including Parkinson’s disease, lung health, dementia and healthy aging.
In a recent comparison of group singing and yoga for people living with Parkinson’s disease, both activities improved mood and reduced cortisol, but the singing group showed greater social bonding and significant increases in oxytocin.
The togetherness is not incidental.
Our bodies respond to shared rhythm
When we sing, breathing becomes patterned. And when people sing the same musical phrases together, those respiratory patterns can begin to coordinate.
Research on group singing has found synchronized patterns in breathing and aspects of heart-rate variability, particularly during singing in unison.
That does not mean everyone’s heart suddenly beats at exactly the same rate. It means that shared musical structure can produce measurable coordination in bodily rhythms.
It gives another dimension to something people often notice in a circle: after some time singing together, the room can begin to feel more settled and coordinated.
Singing, stress and mood
Cortisol is one of the biological measures researchers use when studying the body’s stress response.
A number of group-singing studies have found reductions in salivary cortisol after singing. SingWell’s work has found this across several populations and settings, while also examining mood, social bonding and oxytocin.
This suggests that singing engages several processes at once that are relevant to stress regulation: breathing, vocalization, rhythm, attention, social contact and movement.
Singing and postpartum mental health
Some of the strongest evidence for community singing as a health intervention comes from work with new mothers experiencing postnatal depression.
The UK Melodies for Mums program brings mothers and babies together for ten weeks of group singing.
A large randomized controlled trial published in 2025 found that mothers assigned to the singing program had lower depression scores at later follow-ups than those offered existing community mother-and-baby activities. The researchers also evaluated implementation and cost-effectiveness and found the intervention feasible, acceptable and cost-effective.
What interests us here is not only that the intervention involved group singing. It was communal, repetitive, participatory, ongoing and accessible to people who were not coming to become musicians.
Those are many of the same qualities that sit at the centre of community singing.
This research has also helped support a wider international movement exploring singing with mothers and babies, alongside community-based networks such as Singing Mamas.
Singing and social connection
This may be one of the most important reasons to pay attention to communal singing.
The World Health Organization now identifies social isolation and loneliness as significant determinants of health. Its 2025 global report calls for social connection to be treated alongside physical and mental health as a public-health concern.
Arts participation is especially interesting because it can combine several things associated with wellbeing at once: social interaction, sensory experience, emotional expression, cognitive stimulation and physical activity.
Singing adds something else. We create the experience ourselves. We are not simply in the same room consuming the same thing. Each person contributes to what everyone else hears.
Hear Songbirds on CBC
Listen to the feature →What we have seen here in Toronto
Singing Together at Access Alliance
Kate Keenan of Songbirds and Rieko Asaba of Held in Song co-designed and facilitated Singing Together with Access Alliance Multicultural Health and Community Services as a sustained community singing program supporting newcomer mental health, social connection and belonging.
Songs were taught in the oral tradition so that participation did not depend on English fluency, literacy, musical experience or reading music and lyrics.
Participants reported connection across cultures, increased confidence, opportunities to practise English, reduced loneliness and stress, and a greater sense of belonging.
One participant described it simply:
“When we sing all together, I don’t feel that I’m alone.”
Health Promoter Christen Kong also observed that participants began making the space their own — adding movement, requesting songs, sharing memories and forming relationships across cultures.
The Singing Together report ultimately recommends stronger connections between community singing and health and settlement services, sustained programs rather than only short-term pilots, and further integration with social-prescribing approaches.
Why social prescribing?
Medical care is one part of health. So are friendship, participation, movement, creativity, purpose and having somewhere you feel expected. That is the territory social prescribing is trying to address.
Community singing is particularly interesting because a single practice can be:
- social — people meet and return to one another
- physical — breath, voice, vibration and movement are involved
- creative — participants make the experience rather than receive it
- low-barrier — expertise is not required for entry
- non-verbal — connection does not rely entirely on conversation
- repeatable — songs can be remembered and used outside the circle
- collective — the group itself becomes part of the experience
SingWell is now exploring this explicitly through projects such as Singing on Prescription, delivered through a community health centre for people with lung-health challenges. Preliminary results have included increased trust and connection alongside reductions in distress, anxiety and reported shortness of breath after singing sessions.
Science can measure some things better than others
Research can measure cortisol. It can measure symptom scores, pain thresholds, heart-rate variability and responses on loneliness scales.
Those findings help us understand this practice and make a stronger case for bringing participatory arts into health and community settings.
But they don’t capture everything. It is harder to put a number on what happens when someone who has spent forty years saying “I can’t sing” begins using their voice again. Or when strangers stop sounding like strangers. Or when somebody can be sad in a room with other people without having to explain why.
We are interested in both kinds of knowledge: what research can measure and what people experience when they sing together.
Science is giving us more language for some of the processes involved. Humans have been practising them for a very long time.
Follow the research
Group singing, mood, cortisol & oxytocin
SingWell / Good & Russo
Group singing vs. individual singing
Research across health and communication
Community singing & postnatal depression
2025 randomized controlled trial
Arts, health & social connection
World Health Organization: Arts and Health
Loneliness & social connection
WHO Commission on Social Connection
Singing Together report
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