Group singing is globally dominant, and is related to both social context and social complexity

Abstract

**Author(s):** Shilton, D; Passmore, S; Savage, PE Singing is involved in the most crucial events defining social life. One important feature of music performance is its sociovocal organization, ranging from unaccompanied solo to a multi-part chorus. It was previously hypothesized that this feature is related to social organization, so that emphasis on solo singing is more common in large-scale hierarchical societies, while levelled group singing is more common in small-scale egalitarian ones. We analyze two global song corpora: Cantometrics (5,776 coded recordings from 1,026 societies) and NHS Ethnography (4,709 coded ethnographic texts from 60 societies). We examine the prevalence of group singing, and fit multilevel models predicting sociovocal organization based on social context and measures of social complexity. We find that in both corpora, group singing is more common overall and in most societies, and its likelihood is dependent on social context. Social complexity is associated with greater likelihood of solo singing and more leader-dominant group singing. These results support previous proposals that music is primarily a communal phenomenon and that sociovocal organization and social complexity are functionally related.