Cultural tastes and practices vary among people in different social positions. But this variation is not random. There is some regularity to patterns of cultural taste and practice across the social strata. Three possible explanations exist.

1. Attending university may enable someone to move into a more advantaged social position, and education may also affect cultural tastes. University graduates may be more likely to listen to classical music than non-graduates because they have been exposed to it and to other people who like it.
2. Social class is associated with income and income may provide people with the freedom to enjoy the cultural arts.
3. A final explanation is social status. High-status occupations increase the likelihood that people enjoy highbrow cultural activities because other people in those high-status occupations also enjoy those activities. That is, cultural taste moves through friendship networks and so people who move into advantaged social positions will become more like their peers in terms of their cultural tastes.

To date, education and social status appear to explain most of the association between cultural tastes and social position. Social class and income seem to be less important.

Cultural tastes, practices and participation

Cultural practices are different. They are not quite like cultural tastes. Saying that you like classical music is not the same as going to a concert hall to hear Beethoven’s seventh symphony.

Participating in the arts requires more time and money than expressing a cultural taste. Moreover, participating in the arts can involve entering into public spaces that have unfamiliar codes of conduct or esoteric modes of communication that can make the uninitiated feel ill at ease.

Cultural practices are not cultural tastes because the barriers to participating in the arts are quite different from the barriers to talking about cultural tastes.

So, although education and social status explain cultural tastes, do they also explain cultural participation?

To answer this question, I examined data on cultural participation, income, social class, education and social status from around 70,000 people. Education remains the strongest predictor of cultural participation, while social status and social class are not as clearly associated.

This is important because government policy is currently concerned with encouraging arts participation, but policies are often based on research examining patterns of taste and not patterns of practice. This may be useful (and necessary) in some cases but it can also lead to mistakes. My research suggests that tastes and practices are not the same and that predictors of one are not necessarily predictors of the other.

Income and cultural taste

But there are still important questions that remain unexplored in this area. Although cultural tastes and income are correlated, it does not explain why. That is, it does not explain the mechanism or process through which this association is generated.

Cultural tastes and income could be correlated because people with high incomes are friends and become more similar over time. In this perspective, Jane may get a new high-paying job and over time change her cultural tastes, becoming more similar to her colleagues. But cultural tastes and income could be correlated because cultural tastes are used as a criteria when deciding whether Jane will get that new high-paying job or not.

This process matters because if cultural tastes are used as a criteria to determine access to high-pay occupations, then this may be one mechanism through which inequalities are reproduced because people with the ‘right’ cultural tastes are more likely to come from more affluent backgrounds.

To some, this cultural reproduction of inequality may seem far-fetched but evidence from both the US and the UK suggests that cultural tastes are being used as criteria to determine entry into high-pay occupations.

This is an important next step in this research agenda. To examine not just the inequalities in cultural practice across society, but to also explain how those inequalities are generated and whether they disadvantage particular groups, constraining their ability to be upwardly mobile in society.

This article first appeared in Arts Professional magazine: our thanks to the editorial board for permitting us to republish this material. Read the original post here. 

A decade ago, any mention of a choir would probably have brought Sunday morning hymns to mind. But there’s been a revolution in attitudes towards joining the local choir. Adding well-known, mainstream music to the repertoire, the small screen appeal of television choirmaster Gareth Malone, and the increased visibility of choirs such as Rock Choirand Popchoir, have attracted a new crowd to the idea of the communal singalong. It is estimated that an incredible 2.8m Britons are now members of a choir.

Which is good news – for singing in a choir is beneficial in a number of different ways. We’ve just published some research that reveals that group singing not only helps forge social bonds, it also does so particularly quickly, acting as an excellent icebreaker. We’ve also shown that community singing is effective for bonding large groups, making it an ideal behaviour to improve our broader social networks. This is particularly valuable in today’s often alienating world, where many of our social interactions are conducted remotely via Facebook and Twitter.

But why are so many people flocking to choirs? There’s almost certainly an X Factor effect at play, with people, inspired by TV talent shows, becoming increasingly willing to stand up and perform. It also has long been believed that music-making can create a strong sense of well-being, but since it’s very hard to find a suitable “control” activity, this area is particularly hard to research scientifically.

Although this remains a problem, a number of recent developments have helped us to understand how group singing can improve physical and mental health, as well as promote social bonding.

Body and mind

The physiological benefits of singing, and music more generally, have long been explored. Music making exercises the brain as well as the body, but singing is particularly beneficial for improving breathing, posture and muscle tension. Listening to and participating in music has been shown to be effective in pain relief, too, probably due to the release of neurochemicals such as β-endorphin (a natural painkiller responsible for the “high” experienced after intense exercise).

There’s also some evidence to suggest that music can play a role in sustaining a healthy immune system, by reducing the stress hormone cortisol and boosting the Immunoglobin A antibody.

Music has been used in different cultures throughout history in many healing rituals, and is already used as a therapy in our own culture (for the relief of mental illness, breathing conditions and language impairment, for example). Everyone can sing – however much we might protest – meaning it is one of the most accessible forms of music making, too. Song is a powerful therapy indeed.

Regular choir members report that learning new songs is cognitively stimulating and helps their memory, and it has been shown that singing can help those suffering from dementia, too. The satisfaction of performing together, even without an audience, is likely to be associated with activation of the brain’s reward system, including the dopamine pathway, which keeps people coming back for more.

The psychology of singing

Singing has also been shown to improve our sense of happiness and wellbeing. Research has found, for example, that people feel more positive after actively singing than they do after passively listening to music or after chatting about positive life events. Improved mood probably in part comes directly from the release of positive neurochemicals such as β-endorphin, dopamine and serotonin. It is also likely to be influenced by changes in our sense of social closeness with others.

Increasing evidence suggests that our social connections can play a vital role in maintaining our health – a good social network, for example, can have more health benefits than giving up smoking. So it’s possible that singing can improve health by expanding our social group. Indeed, the rapid social bonding that choirs encourage could therefore be even more beneficial.

Even if we don’t necessarily talk to everyone in our choir, we might experience a general feeling of being connected with the group, leading to our sense of increased community and belonging.

Our choral ancestors

Being part of a cohesive group has been essential for survival throughout our evolutionary history, but being part of a group also raises challenges, such as conflict over resources and mates. In order to survive, our ancestors needed ways to keep the group together through these conflicts.

Music is found in all human cultures around the world. The oldest bone flute is 40,000 years old, so music has been around at least this long. This, and the fact that music often occurs in social settings, from religious rituals to football games, suggests that music might be an evolved behaviour for creating community cohesion.

In Western societies, music-making is often thought to be the domain of a talented few, but very few people actually have no musical ability. The growth of community choirs open to anyone demonstrates these inherent skills and suggests that we are returning to the origins of communal musical behaviour. In light of mounting concerns about loneliness and isolation and the increasingly urgent search for solutions, it is fascinating that people seem to be returning to an interest in connecting with one another through singing. The evidence indicates that our singing ancestors might have held a key to better social well-being.

Singing provides an inclusive and cost-effective means of combating the disintegration of communities that is becoming endemic in many societies today. So whether you’re more into chamber music, the Beatles or Frozen singalongs, finding the right choir could prove the perfect way to improve your health, well-being, and social life.

This article was originally published on The Conversation under the title "Choir singing improves health, happiness – and is the perfect icebreaker". Click here to read the original version. 

Many of us listen to music while we work, thinking that it will help us to concentrate on the task at hand. And in fact, recent research has found that music can have beneficial effects on creativity. When it comes to other areas of performance, however, the impact of background music is more complicated.

The assumption that listening to music when working is beneficial to output likely has its roots in the so-called “Mozart effect”, which gained wide media attention in the early 1990s. Put simply, this is the finding that spatial rotation performance (mentally rotating a 3D dimensional shape to determine whether it matches another or not) is increased immediately after listening to the music of Mozart, compared to relaxation instructions or no sound at all. Such was the attention that this finding garnered that the then US governor of Georgia, Zell Miller, proposed giving free cassettes or CDs of Mozart’s music to prospective parents.

Subsequent studies have cast doubt on the necessity of the music of Mozart to produce this effect – a “Schubert effect”, a “Blur effect”, and even a “Stephen King effect” (his audiobook rather than his singing) have all been observed. In addition, musicians could show the effect purely from imagining the music rather than actually listening to it.

So researchers then suggested that the “Mozart effect” was not due to his music as such, but rather to people’s optimum levels of mood and arousal. And so it became the “mood and arousal effect”.

Unfortunately, the situations in which most mood and arousal effects are observed are slightly unrealistic. Do we really sit and listen to music, switch it off, and then engage in our work in silence? More likely is that we work with our favourite tunes playing in the background.

ow sound affects performance has been the topic of laboratory research for over 40 years, and is observed through a phenomenon called the irrelevant sound effect. Basically, this effect means that performance is poorer when a task is undertaken in the presence of background sound (irrelevant sound that you are ignoring), in comparison to quiet.

To study irrelevant sound effect, participants are asked to complete a simple task which requires them to recall a series of numbers or letters in the exact order in which they saw them – similar to trying to memorise a telephone number when you have no means to write it down. In general, people achieve this by rehearsing the items either aloud or under their breath. The tricky thing is being able to do this while ignoring any background noise.

Two key characteristics of the irrelevant sound effect are required for its observation. First, the task must require the person to use their rehearsal abilities, and second, the sound must contain acoustical variation – for example, sounds such as “n, r, p” as opposed to “c, c, c”. Where the sound does not vary much acoustically, then performance of the task is much closer to that observed in quiet conditions. Interestingly, it does not matter whether the person likes the sound or not. Performance is equally as poor whether the background sound is music the person likes or dislikes.

The irrelevant sound effect itself comes from attempting to process two sources of ordered information at the same time – one from the task and one from the sound. Unfortunately, only the former is required to successfully perform the serial recall task, and the effort expended in ensuring that irrelevant order information from the sound is not processed actually impedes this ability.

A similar conflict is also seen when reading while in the presence of lyrical music. In this situation, the two sources of words – from the task and the sound – are in conflict. The subsequent cost is poorer performance of the task in the presence of music with lyrics.

What this all means is that whether having music playing in the background helps or hinders performance depends on the task and on the type of music, and only understanding this relationship will help people maximise their productivity levels. If the task requires creativity or some element of mental rotation then listening to music one likes can increase performance. In contrast, if the task requires one to rehearse information in order then quiet is best, or, in the case of reading comprehension, quiet or instrumental music.

One promising area of the impact of music on cognitive abilities stems from actually learning to play a musical instrument. Studies show that children who are being musically trained show an improvement in intellectual abilities. However, the reasons behind this are, at present, unknown and likely to be complex. It may not be the music per se that produces this effect but more the activities associated with studying music, such as concentration, repeated practice, lessons and homework.

This article was originally published on The Conversation. Click here to read the original article