The collective involuntary nervous system of your team

When we sing together, regardless of the song or the venue, it means that despite our differences, our bodies are unifying.

We are sharing space and breath and time, doing the exact same thing together.

That’s why things like chanting, karaoke, church choirs, alma mater fight songs and seventh inning stretches are spiritually powerful experiences.

Music creates a firm footing for something bigger to take hold. Our physical world language is merely inventory for deeper connection.

Mcluhan coined a term for this decades ago in his book on the global village. It’s called the resonating interval, aka, the invisible borderline between visual and acoustic space:

It’s the interfacial gap between vibrational orders or frequency domains where new creation is called into being, where myriad recombinations in creative interplay reconfigure creation in new forms. The true action in the event was not on earth or on the moon, but rather in the airless void between. 

No wonder it feels so exhilarating once the song is done. When we sing, we do more than share words. We cross a metaphorical border where different things are amalgamating their routines. It’s a moment of truth, revelation, freedom and release. 

At first I was afraid, I was petrified. Kept thinking I could never live without you by my side. 

There’s even one study that suggests singing has evolved to facilitate social cohesion among our species. The researchers argue that singing may have evolved to quickly bond large human groups of relative strangers, through their encouraging willingness to coordinate by enhancing positive affect.

Thanks to the resonating interval, modern humans have been able to create and maintain much larger social networks than their evolutionary relatives.

Perhaps the corporate would could sing a few pages of this hymnal. Instead of dragging their employees into lame and convoluted team building activities, maybe companies should get primitive, crank up the volume and let their people belt out a few bars.

We don’t have to be good at it, we just have to be together.

Whatever muscle keeps you from going all out in our singing, whatever muscle keeps your song down, find a way to reactivate it.  

LET ME ASK YA THIS…
How might music move you from stagnation and isolation into expansion and cohesion?