Feeling Troubled? Give Treble a Try
https://greatergood.berkeley.edu/article/item/science_of_singing
Music transcends race, gender, language, socioeconomic status, political beliefs, and geographic location. It can be found in every culture and it dates as far back as 40,000 years ago. Jacques Launay and Eiluned Pearce in their article “The New Science of Singing Together” explain how music, specifically choirs, has been found to bring people closer together. The simple act of singing has been found to make people happier and improve their overall well-being physically and mentally. Thus, when tied to a social setting like a choir those positive affects can provide people with a sense of true belonging in a world. A sense of belonging that is being threatened by the age of “social” networking. But, what does all this talk of choirs have to do with graph theory? Well, if being part of a choir poses all of these health, mental, and social benefits it would be interesting to see how these benefits possibly affect the structure of a network for a choir.
Since choirs create a sense of belonging it is highly likely that among the members of the choir there are strong ties. However, choirs tend to be large. So everyone may not know each other well, so there are also a few weak ties within choirs. Singing creates endorphins and improves mood. This would cause members in the choir to potentially associate positive feelings with the other members. These positive feelings towards each other could result in a structural balance within the group since singing makes people happier causing them to be friendlier. Thus, if singing makes people happier it would be highly unlikely that there would be many unbalanced triangles within the choir.
Singing has been found as a way to unite large groups of people allowing people to get to know more people. The triadic closure property can come into play as a member who is in the choir is friends with two people in the choir, causing those two people to ultimately become friends with each other. They’re likely to become friends because they’re both friends with the same person, which creates trust and they have the opportunity meet because they are in the same choir. Since choir is a social group for people with a love for singing then through the strong triadic closure property if members of the group kept introducing two of their strong ties to each other then everyone would ultimately have some kind of connection with each other. A choir can even be looked at as an ego network with the choir conductor as the ego since at every rehearsal the members have to, in some way, interact with the choir conductor. Thus, it is not possible for there to ever be a local bridge in the choir because everyone in the choir is friends with the choir conductor. If choir is a social community where everyone feels like they belong then the clustering coefficient of the choir conductor’s friends in the choir is probably very high if almost everyone is friends with each other.
The social, mental, and physical benefits that choir singing gives people can be used to predict the possible network structure of the group.