Recently, our producer Justine Paradis noticed something. Humans really like to sing together in groups: birthday parties, sports games, church hymns, protest chants, singing along to Taylor Swift at the Eras concert… the list could get very long.

But… why? Did singing play a part in human evolution? Why does singing together make us feel so good?

Featuring Hannah Mayree, Ani Patel, Dor Shilton, and Arla Good.

A participant living with Parkinson’s demonstrates progress over the course of a 13-week “singing intervention.” Courtesy of the SingWell Project.

ADDITIONAL MATERIALS

Bobby McFerrin in 2009 at the World Science Festival, demonstrating the intuitive power of the pentatonic scale, and in 2010, improvising in a stadium in Germany with 60,000 singers.

A short documentary about Sing For Your Life! and OneVoice Circle Singers.

Check out Hannah Mayree’s music and work.

Dor Shilton and Ani Patel collaborated on a paper (currently preprint) examining four societies where collective music-making is rare.

Dor Shilton’s paper on the evolution of music as an “interactive technology” and open-access analysis of patterns in group singing.

This journal presented the hypothesis of music as a mechanism for social bonding as part of an ongoing conversation.

SingWell’s forthcoming research on group singing, aging, and Parkinson’s disease.

A cheerful karaoke sesh. Credit: Cord Allman on Pexels.

SUPPORT

To share your questions and feedback with Outside/In, call the show’s hotline and leave us a voicemail. The number is 1-844-GO-OTTER. No question is too serious or too silly.

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Follow Outside/In on Instagram or join our private discussion group on Facebook.

CREDITS

Outside/In host: Nate Hegyi

Reported, produced, and mixed by Justine Paradis

Edited by Taylor Quimby

Executive Producer: Taylor Quimby

Our team also includes Felix Poon, Marina Henke, and Kate Dario.

NHPR’s Director of Podcasts is Rebecca Lavoie.

Field recordings of group singing by Tamás Bohács, Kevin Luce, Guy Burns, Mondofred, Image Film Berlin, and Bruno Auzet on freesound.org.

Music by David Celeste, Guuustavv, Lennon Hutton, bomull, Farrell Wooten, and Blue Dot Sessions.

Special thanks to Chelsea Steinauer-Scudder, Emma Scudder, and everyone at the song circle.

download a transcript

Audio Transcript

Note: Episodes of Outside/In are made as pieces of audio, and some context and nuance may be lost on the page. Transcripts are generated using a combination of speech recognition software and human transcribers, and may contain errors.

Justine Paradis: Hey Nate.

Nate Hegyi: Hey Justine

Justine Paradis: So last September, I had a bunch of people over my backyard. The cicadas were buzzing. We had kids running around, babies on blankets. It was super intergenerational.

Song circle ambi: Hey! How’s it going? I’m Justine’s mom…

Justine Paradis: And what we were there to do was to sing together.

Song circle singing “Mingulay Boat Song”: Heel ho boys, let her go boys, sailing homeward to Mingulay…

Nate Hegyi: This is so cool that you do this. I feel like I did this, this is a very college thing that I would do.

Justine Paradis: Oh!

Nate Hegyi: Like, you'd have friends over, but you’d just like jam around, we’d play bluegrass songs. That’s how I started my first band was these informal potluck dinners we’d have.

Justine Paradis: Oh cool.

Nate Hegyi: And then we’d all bring instruments and play and we’d get too drunk and the music would get sloppier and sloppier and sloppier. But that kind of died out in my mid-twenties, and so it’s pretty amazing that you’re doing this, you know, now, as an adult.

Justine Paradis: Yeah, it was only my second time, uh, this song circle. But I was never actually a musician of any kind really.

Nate Hegyi: Mhm, yeah.

Justine Paradis: Like, dabbled a bit in school but – so this was kind of a new feeling for me.

Nate Hegyi: What were you guys singing?

Justine Paradis: Yeah, so, are you familiar with the Great American Songbook?

Nate Hegyi: I am. Yeah. Are we talking about, like, Woody Guthrie songs and things like that? Like “This land is your land?”

Justine Paradis: I mean, it’s in there for sure.

Nate Hegyi: Okay.

Justine Paradis: So the Great American Songbook is this list of 20th century American classics. It’s more of a concept than an actual book, it's like a canon.

Nate Hegyi: Yeah.

Justine Paradis: But you can find collections from it, like spiral bound songbooks with hundreds of songs from the 1920 to the1960s.

Song circle singing Shake Sugaree: Oh, lordy me! Didn’t I shake sugaree, everything I got is done and pawned.

Justine Paradis: You know Shake Sugaree?

Nate Hegyi: Oh, Sugaree! I know that from the Grateful Dead! Um, are people holding the books out reading the lyrics? Or do they all know this by heart?

Justine Paradis: Little bit of both.

Nate Hegyi: Okay. Yeah.

Justine Paradis: Yeah. Some people have been doing this forever, some people are newer. But that’s actually an interesting question though, because I was actually surprised at the degree to which I knew the words and the melody of so many songs.

Nate Hegyi: Mhm!

Justine Paradis: Because, again, I’m not really a musician. I like to sing, but it's mostly something I do on my own, like in the shower or in the car.

Nate Hegyi: Yeah!

Justine Paradis: Group singing is kinda rare in my life. And yet the culture is in me.

Nate Hegyi: Isn’t that an amazing thing? You realize that you know the lyrics to a song.

Justine Paradis: Yeah!

Nate Hegyi: Like, you’re like, ‘I’ve heard this before, I know how to sing these songs, how do I know this?’

Justine Paradis: And then the more I thought about it, the more I realized that informal group singing is all over the place. I’m not just talking about campfire songs. Like, we sing happy birthday.

Nate Hegyi: Yeah.

Justine Paradis: At big holidays, we carol.

Good King Wenceslas, Guy Burns on Freesound.org

Justine Paradis: There’s a lot of singing at protests.

Protest chant in Portugal, Mondofred on Freesound.org

Justine Paradis: Then, of course there’s church.

Orthodoxe Romanian Mass, Bruno Auzet on Freesound.org

Justine Paradis: And the organized religion that is sports.

EURO2024 English football fans singing, Image Film Berlin on Freesound.org

Nate Hegyi: Oh my god, you go to a Red Sox game, and everybody is [singing], “Sweet Caroline, ba ba ba.”

Red Sox game: ba ba ba

Justine Paradis: I’m kinda shocked that you know that, as a guy famously from the West.

Nate Hegyi: My wife is from Boston. So I’ve been to a Red Sox game.

MUSIC: Jupiter Aurora, David Celeste

Justine Paradis: So, Nate, the more I looked, the more I saw it. And so I wondered, why do humans sing together? How did this evolve? Why does it make us feel good?

Nate Hegyi: That sounds like a really good Outside/In episode, Justine.

Justine Paradis: I think you are so right about that.

Nate Hegyi: This is Outside/In, I am Nate Hegyi. But today, producer Justine Paradis has the story. Has the song. Take it away, Justine.

MUSIC FADE

\\\\ PREROLL ////

Justine Paradis: Hannah Mayree was lucky. They were raised in a musical family.

Hannah Mayree: And so I think that was kind of my first original way of, like, that it was normal to sing and… have fun, to harmonize with family or whoever, like in the car or in the kitchen.

Justine Paradis: Today, Hannah is involved in a lotta cool stuff. They’re a performing musician, and a founder of the Black Banjo Reclamation Project.

Clip of “The Day” by Hannah Mayree

Justine Paradis: But ten or so years ago, Hannah was spending a lot of time in the Bay area of California. And that’s where one day they saw flyers promoting an event. It was called:

Hannah Mayree: Sing for Your Life! And it was like, cool, “Sing for your life.” Okay! … They were doing this twelve hour singing event at one of the churches in Oakland.

Justine Paradis: Twelve hours of singing with huge groups of people.

2014 12-hour Marathon, David Worm, Oakland CA

Hannah Mayree: And that was kind of my first experience, I think as an adult, where I was really just in a really big, beautiful space that had like hundreds of people… singing together.

Justine Paradis: Hannah had stumbled across a phenomenon called “circle singing,” developed in the eighties by artist Bobby McFerrin, who’s most widely known for this.

Clip of Don’t Worry Be Happy

Justine Paradis: The global hit, “Don’t Worry Be Happy.” But McFerrin’s legacy goes way beyond that. Like, there’s this really amazing video of Bobby McFerrin at a science festival, on stage in front of an audience.

Bobby McFerrin: [ba ba ba ba ba]

Justine Paradis: It’s a panel about music & neuroscience. He’s hopping from side to side and singing a note each time, as if he’s on an invisible piano, leaping from key to key.

Bobby McFerrin: [ba bah ba bah ba bah]

Justine Paradis: And then he hops to a third place on the stage.

Bobby McFerrin: [ba BAH - “okay!” laughter]

Justine Paradis: And the audience somehow intuitively knows what note to sing. McFerrin is trying to make the point that most people, on some level, have this in us.

Bobby McFerrin: [applause] Now what’s interesting to me about that, regardless of where I am, anywhere, every audience gets that…

Justine Paradis: Bobby McFerrin’s circle singing feels like it’s part of that same belief system. It’s an improvisational style of singing with a song leader and a bunch of participants, but less professionals, and more regular folks.

Clip: OneVoice CircleSingers welcomes you to Sing for your life!

Hannah Mayree: When you're doing Improvisational circle singing, like, you have to be okay with the fact that the person who's leading you doesn't know what's going on, and they don't need to know what's going on. And they're making it up.

Justine Paradis: Often, there’s no lyrics, just kinda nonsense words. And the whole thing is sort of organic, physical.

OneVoice CircleSingers: da da da DA, listen to each other!

Hannah Mayree: There's a lot of like, body language and eye contact… they're kind of keeping the beat with their body. Maybe their toe is tapping.

Justine Paradis: It’s like the music is rippling around and between the singers and the leader.

Hannah Mayree: One of the things that's nice about it is that you're sort of not asked to think of the song as a whole thing. You are one part of a larger organism that is making a creation.

Justine Paradis: This can happen at huge scales. Like, Bobby McFerrin once led an improvised song circle in a stadium in Germany, drumming on his chest and singing with 60,000 people.

Clip of Sing! Improvisation with Bobby McFerrin

Ani Patel: When voices align like that… anybody who's sung in a group does have this amazing sense of how it's kind of this larger unity that is like the super voice, in a way, right? … Like a giant's voice. And it's really quite a remarkable feeling.

Justine Paradis: This is Ani Patel. He studies music and the brain, including how music came to be, and patterns of group singing across cultures.

Ani Patel: And you could imagine before technology, before recording, before instruments… How do you create that kind of sense of size and sound? So when people do that, I think it also must have been just very powerful to experience.

Justine Paradis: When Bobby McFerrin hopped around the stage to demonstrate the power of the pentatonic scale, it seems to be suggesting that a sense of music is something humans have inside our bodies and inside our minds. And when I talked to Ani, I got the impression that, in a sense, that’s true.

MUSIC: Germanius, Blue Dot Sessions

Justine Paradis: Our brains actually process singing differently than they process speech.

Ani Patel: I mean, this goes back to observations in, like, the 1700s when people found that after certain types of brain accidents, some people could not formulate sentences and produce fluent speech, but they could still sing, especially familiar old songs. And so it wasn't a problem with their vocal apparatus. It was something in the brain that had selectively impaired speech but not singing…

Justine Paradis: Our brains also identify singing when we hear it. There’s research that indicates that we have specialized auditory neurons that are tuned specifically to pick up on song, as opposed to speech or other environmental sounds.

Ani Patel: …and this is in people without any special musical training…

Justine Paradis: All this feels so deliciously interesting. But it also feels kind of intuitive. Like, I have a pretty good memory, but it is wild how when a song starts playing that I loved in high school, I know the words and the melody and the beat even if I haven’t listened to it in years. It definitely feels like a different part of my brain than the one that’s writing this sentence, or the one that’s speaking it now.

And it got me wondering about human evolution. Like, which came first? A grunted word? Or some kind of melodic communication? In other words, did humans sing before they started to speak?

MUSIC END

Ani Patel: Well, it's an old debate. I mean, that's exactly what Darwin thought… um, he thought that song predated speech, and human ancestors sang some sort of wordless songs as a form of courtship, kind of like birds do today, and other people argue that, no, speech came first and song came later. You know, I don't know if we can definitively say… maybe, Dor, you know, more recent research than I do, but it's, it's very hard to say.

Dor Shilton: Mm, I'm not aware of any research that seems to make any, any definitive claims.

Justine Paradis: Here, Ani just turned to ask the other person on the call what he thinks. Dor Shilton, a philosopher who studies the cultural evolution of music. Dor and Ani just collaborated on a paper, so I spoke with the two of them together.

Dor told me that tracing the evolutionary history of group singing is really hard to do. First of all, words and melodies don’t fossilize. The earliest archaeological evidence we have of music, though, is about 40,000 years old: a flute, made from bird bones.

Singing has got to be so, so much older.

Dor Shilton: But because we know that people mainly use their bodies to sing, to dance. They could perhaps drum. They could use organic instruments made from organic materials, we know that it must be more ancient than that.

Justine Paradis: One thing we can do is take what we do know about human evolution and put that together with what we know about how singing functions in society today. And when we do that, a story starts to emerge.

MUSIC: Feeeeelings, Guustavv

Justine Paradis: About two million years ago, humans left Africa and migrated across continents. I’m talking humans broadly here. Not just Homo sapiens, but other species, too, like Homo erectus and Neanderthals. Surviving these journeys…

Dor Shilton: This indicates that they have an ability to learn and to sort of preserve some types of learning because they can adapt to different environments.

Justine Paradis: Humans began hunting large animals – a big deal for a primate. And they began crafting more complex tools, like hand axes.

Dor Shilton: These are not easy to make. They require like a long apprenticeship, and you need to work a lot at it to create these kinds of beautifully crafted instruments.

Justine Paradis: Everything we just mentioned – migrating across continents, group hunting, making tools – all of these things would have necessitated an ever-increasing reliance on each other, and a need for strong social bonds.

MUSIC FADE

Justine Paradis: This is where singing comes in. There’s this concept in sociology called an “interaction ritual.”

Dor Shilton: What happens when people communicate, in the most basic sense?

Justine Paradis: Think about what happens when you have a really good conversation with someone. You’re making eye contact. Maybe you lean into each other.

Dor Shilton: People are present with one another. They are so-called co-present [laughs]. They are attentive to the same thing.

Justine Paradis: You might even start unconsciously mirroring each other, using the same turns of phrase or finishing each other’s sentences.

Dor Shilton: So we might be philosophizing, we might be talking about very, you know, abstract things, but what is actually happening with our bodies is that we are subtly imitating one another, and we are getting a liking to each other from this process of imitation.

Justine Paradis: Singing is like that. A good conversation, but turned up to a thousand. It is a profound way to grow social bonds.

MUSIC: Siren Song, Farrell Wooten

Dor Shilton: People tend to sing whenever they gather… It seems to emerge whenever we gather with one another, we sing in one way or another.

Justine Paradis: This story of group singing – it’s part of what’s known as the “social bonding” hypothesis. We sing because we’re a social species; we’re a social species, so we sing. Singing together almost trains us to belong.

Dor Shilton: We sing because we want to be part of something. It’s a way of participating in something that’s bigger than us.

… The more you cooperate, the more you become dependent on cooperation. So we all know this. We are at a point where, if for some reason we are detached from the global market – let's consider the present environment… I don't know how to grow food. I don't know how to make clothes. I don't know anything. So there is a feedback loop that goes on there where you become more and more and more dependent.

And it becomes more and more important to communicate efficiently… you know, you get a lot of miscommunication and a lot of misunderstandings with people. So you need to be patient. You need to control yourself better. This is all a very long evolutionary process. And to me, this is the big story of human evolution.

Justine Paradis: Group singing is a powerful tool. It’s hard to think of a more efficient way to get a room of hundreds or even thousands of people willingly doing the exact same thing together. That’s not always a straightforwardly good thing.

There is a dark side to the social bonding hypothesis – because belonging to an in-group, it means there’s also an out-group.

But the more we know about the power of group singing, the more people are exploring ways we can use it to help each other.

Arla Good: I mean this is what I'm devoting my life to, is understanding why we sing together…

… Because it, it's our human right.

Justine Paradis: More after the break.

BREAK

Justine Paradis: This is Outside/In. I’m Justine Paradis.

MUSIC: Throughput, Blue Dot Sessions

Justine Paradis: A couple years ago, a group of scientists, which actually included Dor Shilton, who we heard from earlier – they published an open access paper, analyzing anthropological datasets of traditional songs from around the world. And one thing they found might not surprise you: a lot of times, group singing occurs in religious settings. All kinds of songs, all over the world. Songs for rites of passage. Call and response shamanic chants. Songs for death or harvest, for animals and spirits.

MUSIC SWELL AND FADE

Justine Paradis: This pattern that they found across the world in those archives – I see it in my own life too. Like a lot of people, I grew up singing in church.

Clip from St. Paul’s church on Nantucket livestream

Justine Paradis: That’s one of the things I probably liked most about church, besides coffee hour afterwards. I was raised Episcopal, and there was a lot of call-and-response involved in the service. We also sang a lot of hymns, and in the sea of voices around me, there was freedom. I’d play around with the alto part, then switch halfway to soprano, or experiment with harmonizing with the person next to me. I liked disappearing into the voices around me.

Church organ end

But these days, in the United States, religious service attendance is down, across almost all religious groups, according to a Gallup poll last year. And I’m a part of those statistics. I almost never go to church anymore. But that also means I went from singing with people almost weekly to singing with people almost never… unless you count singing in the car.

Justine: [singing Joni Mitchell in the car]

Now I will say, it was kind of uncomfortable for me to record myself doing this. I feel really free singing in the car mainly because I’m alone. I don’t usually feel comfortable letting loose around most other people.

MUSIC: Trench and Ivory, Blue Dot Sessions

The idea that someone might hear me, or that I just might be witnessed being earnest, it feels embarrassing and scary. And I know I’m not alone in that.

Hannah Mayree: People have been told that they can't sing. People have been told that they can't play music.

Justine Paradis: This again is Hannah Mayree, the banjo player and musician who stumbled into circle singing in Oakland. As a song leader themself, they’re familiar with these types of hang-ups. Hannah actually recently led a retreat to support pregnant and birthing people called Sings to the Sun and Moon, where they used group singing as a tool.

Hannah Mayree: And for me, the questions are like, by whom? And like, why do you think that they said those things?

Justine Paradis: Like, people being told, as a kid in a school choir, that they don’t have a singing voice. That they should play the triangle instead, or maybe even worse: mouth the words, but don’t sing them.

Hannah Mayree: One of the things that I've found when it comes to community singing is that it's either something that culturally people are used to or it's culturally not something that people are used to. And so you just have to kind of work with that and understand that there's a lot of reasons why people are not singing more.

MUSIC FADE

Justine Paradis: Ethnomusicologists sometimes divide music into a couple of categories. Participatory and presentational. Participatory music is when everybody is making music together. Drum circles, sing-a-longs, or call-and-response, like this prayer sung at a Hindu temple.

Hindu prayers singing ritual songs in the temple (Pūjā), Varasiddhi Vinayakar Temple, Tamás Bohács on FreeSound.org

Justine Paradis: Another approach is presentational. Music that’s prepared and performed for an audience, like this young person singing at a concert in France.

Concert in Nanterre, France, performing Snowman by Sia, Kevin Luce via FreeSound.org

Justine Paradis: Now, that’s not to cast musical virtuosity in a bad light. But with a cultural focus on presentational music, it can make singing feel inaccessible to a lot of us. Like, leave it to the professionals or risk getting dragged in your imagined audition for American Idol.

Hannah Mayree: With music in general, like not just with singing, but specifically with singing, because it's like this very natural thing that humans do… has been very much commodified in our modern world, where, like most of the examples that we're seeing of people singing are like, that person is a superstar, that person is famous, that person has a lot of makeup on… there's all of these things that we're like, ‘well, if I don't have that, then where does that put me?’

Justine Paradis: And that is one of the powers of styles like circle singing. It can let many of us back in.

MUSIC: brevduva, bomull

Justine Paradis: These are places where we might be able to put down some of that baggage and give ourselves the chance to enjoy the power of making sounds.

Hannah Mayree: It's okay to have fun. Like, it's okay to just have a good time… it can just be silly… who can make the weirdest sound right now? Who can make the loudest sound? Who can make the softest sound? It doesn't have to be that serious. And I think you, oftentimes, with people who aren't used to it, it kind of has to start from that place… Like, there's nothing wrong with just, like, being silly and having a good time.

MUSIC SWELL

Justine Paradis: I love singing in the car by myself and I’m gonna keep doing it. There’s nothing wrong with that either. But it would be cool to find my way to that feeling around other people again. Because, as it turns out, group singing is super good for you.

MUSIC END

Arla Good: Personally, I know what it, what it feels like to sing with others, to lose my voice in a sea of other people, to feel connected in that way where I feel my boundaries dissolve. I don't know where I end and the next person begins. And that is a very special experience that we don't have so much of in society anymore.

Justine Paradis: This is Arla Good. She’s a psychologist based in Toronto, Canada. And she's the co-director of the SingWell Project, an international initiative focused on understanding the benefits of group singing for different populations.

Arla Good: I wanted to devote my life to understanding this so that we can promote more group singing in society, especially for populations that might necessarily feel excluded from singing because of communication challenges or hearing challenges or voice challenges.

Justine Paradis: Right now, Arla and her colleagues are studying how group singing might help aging populations, especially people with Parkinson’s disease. People living with Parkinson’s lose muscle control, with all kinds of symptoms, like tremors, rigidity, and balance loss… and since the vocal cords are controlled by muscles, it also impacts the voice.

Arla Good: It's a lesser known symptom of Parkinson's that their voice gets really quiet and loses its affect.

Justine Paradis: Enter community choir.

MUSIC: Conscience, Blue Dot Sessions

In a recent study, Arla and her co-researcher assessed two groups of singers over a period of 12 weeks. One group was a healthy aging population, the other was a group of people living with Parkinson’s. Before and after each session, participants rated their mood and answered questions about their sense of social connection.

Arla’s team also gathered physical data.

Arla Good: We collect saliva before and after singing so we can assess cortisol levels. We assess oxytocin levels.

Justine Paradis: Cortisol is the stress hormone. And oxytocin is sometimes referred to as ‘the love drug.’

Arla Good: And we test pain. So, we call it pressure… What we do is we, we bring this, this instrument called the Dolorimeter, and it applies pressure onto the finger of the participant. And they say ‘stop’ when it feels uncomfortable. So, it's before they're experiencing any pain, and we do this before and after singing.

MUSIC FADE

Justine Paradis: What they found was pretty cool. For both groups, the tolerance for pain and discomfort went up after singing. Stress decreased. And as for mood…

Arla Good: We see the mood boost happening more in later sessions. So, in early sessions of choir, when you first show up, you might feel nervous. “What are we doing here? I'm not a singer.” We hear that all the time. Um, so it's not until, you know, week, let's call it week five or week six, where we start to see they come, they show up for choir, and they know they're going to feel good… the opposite effect is true for social connection where we see the boost in social connection happening early. So here's a group of strangers that comes together. They sing and immediately they feel more connected. Um, and then we do see it grow throughout the session.

Justine Paradis: So, group singing was good for everybody. But people living with Parkinson’s can see a special benefit. Arla compared singing to going to the gym for those muscles around the vocal cords. And she shared a video with me to demonstrate this. This is from another study, a participant living with Parkinson’s who was given a “singing intervention” for 13 weeks.

So, in this video, he’s repeating a phrase, variations on “dogs are sitting by the door.” The first clip is from the beginning of the training.

Singwell video: “Dogs are sitting by the door. Dogs are sitting by the door.”

Justine Paradis: Halfway through, his voice is sounding a little stronger.

Singwell video: “Kids are talking by the door.”

Justine Paradis: And then this is what he sounds like at the end of the 13 weeks.

Singwell video: “Dogs are sitting by the door.”

Arla Good: The vocal quality is markedly different than in the first week… It's strengthened. It's going to the gym. He went to the gym and he got stronger and you can really hear that in his voice.

MUSIC: Open Road, Lennon Hutton

Justine Paradis: Aging on its own is scary, even more so with conditions like Parkinson’s. There can be a lot of stigma. Along with the physical symptoms, people often experience social isolation, anxiety, and depression.

It’s a feedback loop. When you’re feeling insecure, you might retreat from socializing, which might lead to deeper isolation. That’s why the biggest benefit of joining the choir, Arla told me, might be the socializing happening around it.

Arla Good: There's this little pet theory that we're developing. We call it “the bread and butter theory.” … The bread is the friendships. This is the sustenance. This is what really matters. This is how you're going to feel supported when you're going through a hard time. The butter is the singing together, which makes the bread easier to consume.

MUSIC FADE

So this is where the friendships happen. This is where they might exchange numbers. They might get together outside of a choir context. The singing is what made that more possible. The butter that made the bread yummy.

Justine Paradis: This is still preliminary research, but Arla dreams of a time when doctors might prescribe group singing – when people are living with something like Parkinson’s, or just when they’re feeling lonely.

MUSIC: sangtrast, bomull

Even Charles Darwin was famously puzzled by music. He said that making music is among “the most mysterious” capacities that humans have.

Singing is part of the story of us. It connects us with something greater, whether that’s a sense of ourselves, a sense of other people, or the spiritual: nature, the cosmos. And it does that faster than just about anything I know.

Arla Good: I see singing as a necessity, an evolutionary necessity, that we needed it to survive.

Justine Paradis: Singing with others is so powerful maybe because it’s so vulnerable. To lose yourself in a sea of voices, you first have to really show yourself by raising your own.

Arla Good: Everybody has access to this apparatus. Um, it might not sound like Celine Dion or Rihanna. That's okay. We all deserve access to this ancient tool of social belonging, of connection, of joy.

MUSIC SWELL

Nate Hegyi: Outside/In was reported and produced this week by Justine Paradis. It was edited by our executive producer Taylor Quimby. I’m your host, Nate Hegyi. Our staff also includes Felix Poon, Marina Henke, and Kate Dario. Our director of on-demand audio is Rebecca Lavoie.

Special thanks to Chelsea Steinauer-Scudder, Emma Scudder, and all the folks at the song circle who graciously allowed Justine to record them singing together.

Field recordings of group singing came from Tamás Bohács, Kevin Luce, Guy Burns, Mondofred, Image Film Berlin, and Bruno Auzet on freesound.org.

Music in this episode came from David Celeste, Guuustavv, Lennon Hutton, bomull, Farrell Wooten, and Blue Dot Sessions.

Outside/In is a production of NHPR. I guess I should probably sing that. *sings* Outside/In is a production of NHPR!

Kate Dario and friends: Alright, load it up folks. SINCE YOU’VE BEEN GONE, I can breathe for the first time, so movin’ on, yeah yeah, thanks to you, now I get, I get what I want…