Dear Hesitant Singer,
Firstly, let me say it’s okay. You have valid reasons why you shy away from singing. But if you'll you allow me, I want to explain why I encourage you to take a brave step on the path to recovering your singing voice...
Maybe the first question to answer is “Why should I even care about singing?” Some people like it, some don't. Does it matter?
It really does matter because singing has been a tool for social connection and self regulation throughout our human evolution. Let's delve into our evolutionary history, biology and anthropology to explain how.
It's understood that early Homo sapiens had the capacity for complex vocalisations around 300,000 years ago. We know this because hyoid bone fossils from that time show the same shape as modern humans. (The hyoid bone is what anchors the tongue and muscles around our larynx and helps with controlling pitch, tone, and volume, which are all necessary for making complex vocal sounds)
Let's say one human generation is 20 years – that means humans have been singing in some form for at least 15,000 generations. That's a very long time! Something that had endured for so long must have give us an evolutionary advantage.
We don't have any records of what early human vocalisations were like but if we understand singing as “using our voices melodically with varying pitch & rhythm” then humans were almost certainly singing before they were talking.
Our closest primate relatives use distinct vocal sounds for courtship, territorial defence, and social bonding. This strongly suggests early humans would have communicated in a similar way - using rhythmic, melodic, and emotionally expressive vocal sounds but without formal speech structures. These vocalizations would have been more like singing than speaking as we know it today and could be considered a 'protolanguage' – the building blocks for the later evolution of structured languages.
The field of neuroscience has shown us how music (singing) and language activate overlapping areas of our brain. The regions of the brain we use for language would likely have evolved from those already being used for singing.
Singing may have boosted early humans cognitive development by making it easier to remember knowledge and, importantly, pass it on. It's much easier to remember information when it's has a melody, rather than just a string of words. (Think of how children remember the A-B-C song but would struggle to remember 26 random sounds without that tune). The repetitive and melodic nature of singing would have meant information could be passed down & retained through generations, long before formalised language structures evolved. This would have given early humans a distinct evolutionary advantage.
It's estimated that structured human speech and language developed 70,000 – 20,000 years ago but that didn't stop us singing. Populations all around the globe have kept singing as a cultural practice. What is it about singing that makes it's such an important part of our human experience?
One primary reason we keep singing is because it conveys emotions better than speech. Research show that the brain processes non-verbal emotional sounds more quickly than words. Non-verbal vocalizations such as screaming, crying, moaning, sighing, and laughing are understood across human cultures, especially when conveying basic emotions like fear, anger, sadness, and joy. Singing is an extension of these kind of vocalisations. Changes in pitch, rhythm, tone, volume, the largely predictable rise and fall of a melody line, the resonance of a harmony mean singing together is a fast track to emotional connection. Singing with a group gives us a sense of a shared emotional experience with fellow singers, whether it’s joy, sadness, or solidarity – or any combination of those!
Importantly, singing promotes group cohesion - the group that sings together, stays together. This theory holds that singing emerged as a way to promote social cohesion and cooperation in early human groups. The rhythmic nature of singing together can be used to synchronize intentions, which brings unity and cooperation - both crucial for early humans survival but also as society developed, for coordinating large groups of people in workforces and armies.
Singing can also align us emotionally. When we sing, a heady cocktail of feel good hormones are released - oxytocin, serotonin, dopamine and our endorphins are firing. Oxytocin is responsible for generating feelings of trust between people, and this bond us together more quickly than talking together. It also means we can feel connected to a whole group of people we sing with, something that would take a lot longer if we had to have one on one conversations with each of them.
It follows that groups who sang together felt more more connected, more bonded and would therefore go the extra mile for each other. That includes fighting together, caring for each other, sharing food and comforting. These traits are all advantageous to our survival, and were passed on through the generations to the present day.
For most of human history humans have lived in small groups. That meant we knew about the lives of all the people around us. Their experiences, their environment, their challenges were ours. We experienced the same periods of abundance and scarcity, and the same cycles of nature. We could express our interpretations, process our reactions and emotional responses to these events through singing together. There’s not a human population on earth that doesn’t sing in some form. Studies of pre-literate cultures show us that singing plays a central role in rituals, ceremonies, and storytelling. Without a written language, these societies use singing to transmit knowledge, myths, and values across generations. Old songs were passed on through the generations. New songs were improvised and those that resonated - had a good hook- were repeated, embellished and passed on. As such, songs were living entities that changed and travelled through time.
In industrialised, Western culture, singing is has largely become an 'optional extra', mainly considered recreation or entertainment. With the advent of recorded music, singing (and musical performance and indeed many manifestations of creative output ), has become the realm of the 'talented'. (We'll unpack more about that and how we can redress that next time.) However, historically that was not the case. Without singing together we lose a fundamental way of communicating, connection & self-regulating.
I hope this has given you, dear hesitant singer an insight into the importance of singing as a basic aspect of being human and expressing our emotions and our connections to others. Throughout our history is has been a fundamental part of our human experience.
Let's make it so again.
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