Ph.D. Thesis - Singing as one: community in synchrony (original) (raw)

This thesis investigates the process termed ‘entrainment’ by which a group of singers can become ‘in time’ or ‘in synchrony’ with each other. Group entrainment is examined through the lenses of a number of disciplines throughout the thesis: ethnography, ethnomusicology, sociology, animal behaviour, complex systems theory, and psychology. Ch. 1 defines the concepts such as entrainment, chant, ritual, participatory and presentational musics, and the ethnographical method that will be used in this thesis. Ch. 2 reveals, through an ethnographical survey of the function of group singing in various traditions around the world, that a central purpose of group singing is to form community. Ch. 3 examines the form of group singing throughout the world, and finds that a general theory of metre, the perceptual basis of entrainment, can be applied to geographically-distinct traditions, but also that some chanting traditions do not need metre for entrainment to be possible. Ch. 4 contextualises Turner and Durkheim’s community-forming concepts of ‘communitas’ and ‘collective effervescence’ within a particular music anthropology study of the Suyán Indian ‘Mouse Ceremony’ in Amazonia, with reference to the concept of ‘entrainment’. After the initial ethnographic survey (Chs. 2-4), the rest of the thesis (Chs. 5-8) explores ways of thinking scientifically about the process of group entrainment. Ch. 5 discusses bottom-up and top-down approaches to understanding group behaviour, with reference to flocking and schooling behaviour in starlings and fish, and chanting and free jazz improvisation in human musical behaviour. Ch. 6 puts the bottom-up and top-down dialectic in the context of the current entrainment literature, in order to suggest new approaches for investigating entrainment in group contexts. Ch. 7 reviews the literature surrounding bottom-up aspects of group interaction such as gesture and visual communication, and the top-down influence of group hierarchy, and also inter-group and joint speech forms of entrainment. The various disciplinary perspectives discussed in previous chapters then provide the basis for an empirical field study in Ch. 8 of group entrainment in Gregorian chant, involving semi-structured interviews with choristers and systematic video analysis of their chanting. The study investigates how these choristers are able to start in synchrony with each other, looking particularly at the role of gesture and metrical perception. I find that no single mode of communication or perception offers an explanation for the precision of onset synchrony on its own, and therefore conclude that group onset synchrony must depend on a combination of many factors. This thesis moves the study of entrainment further by discussing ways in which we can think about and investigate group, as opposed to dyadic (joint), entrainment. It also shows the importance of combining the insights of both anthropological and scientific approaches when investigating group entrainment.