Mass-singing events are becoming increasingly popular, but one local expert says the power people hold when united behind a common purpose isn’t limited to singing.
A recent by mass-singing group Koolulam was the group's first-ever performance in Buffalo, as part of a cooperation with the University at Buffalo to examine the positive effects of collective singing.
When the group started nearly a decade ago, there was no thought about the psychological impact, Koolulam co-founder Michal Shahaf said. The original thought process was to use singing as a means of common communication, she said.
“We never thought that deep at the beginning about the psychology side of the activity. We thought that this kind of activity, it's another way to communicate and to bridge between people," Shahaf said. "It's one thing to imagine that it's probably going to do good to people, but it's a whole different thing to understand how meaningful and how the psychology side of the aspect of that is so deep, and this is exactly what we're doing right now.”
University at Buffalo psychology professor Shira Gabriel is one of the experts working with Koolulam. The effects of a single group of people aren’t always used for a positive purpose, and feelings of connection are usually present regardless of an event’s intended purpose, she said.
“People engaging in mob behavior may also feel as if they're very connected to the other people in the mob, and often they feel as if they're doing something really special or sacred, that there's some broader meaning to what they're doing, even though other people looking at it can see that it isn't," Gabriel said.
The direction often is determined by the person leading a group, she said.
“If you have a leader with a group who takes advantage of the fact that people feel connected to one another and feel as if they're in a special moment, and pushes them towards negative behavior," Gabriel said. "You do increase the odds of negative behavior, but if you have people in a situation where everyone is seeing a concert together, or everyone is experiencing some kind of festival or some sort of great sense of awe with one another. In nature, those are cases where we see a lot of pro-social behavior.”
In a group-thought environment, it helps to step back and analyze situations in third-person, Gabriel said.
While these situations can be weaponized, like the Jan. 6 insurrection, Gabriel says she believes it’s most often used for good, like at concerts, or in the aftermath of Damar Hamlin’s on-field injury in 2023.
Even Koolulam participants often start with their share of negative emotions, Shahaf said. Namely, cynicism over the group’s effectiveness. But that attitude only increases the impact when audiences hear the difference they can make.
“They don't know exactly, how is it going to sound, ‘what I'm going to sing right now, people are going to hear me. I'm not used to singing out outside of my shower,’ and stuff like that," she said. "And so first off, people are becoming less cynical, cynical in those kinds of events. And also, it forces people to step out of their comfort zone. When so many people step out of their comfort zone, this is when the magic happens.”
A large part of setting the tone is dependent on the song choice, and Koolulam spends a long time choosing the right songs for each performance, Shahaf said.
