WIDE ANGLE: LESSONS FROM SILENT DISCO – Journal

Silent discos emerged in the 1970s as a convenient way to get around noise restrictions. In those days, that meant everyone brought their own music loaded onto a Walkman. Later, DJs will create their own radio channels to allow everyone to listen to the same playlist.

These events gained popularity in the early 2000s, when music festivals began hosting silent concerts, with many artists streamed on different channels.

In a regular disco or nightclub, everyone dances together to the same music. But in a silent disco, people can dance in the same space but out of time with each other, if they listen to different music on multiple channels.

This can be a strange experience, but it provides a very useful context for studying the importance of synchronization – more commonly known as “being in sync” on the dance floor.

Here’s why listening to music and dancing in sync brings us closer together

So, what does the “Silent Disco” phenomenon teach us about dance? Researchers used it to study social dynamics and found that it interfered with the social bonding effects of dancing. Silent disco can even help us better understand the evolution of musicality and our rhythmic abilities.

As a cognitive anthropologist, my work is interested in why humans spend so much time singing and dancing, and I am particularly interested in how dance “works” as a social activity.

Silent disco in the laboratory

In a recent study using a silent disco experiment, I wanted to find out how important it was for dancers to be in sync.

Since people were dancing with headphones on, we could use this to control whether or not they were listening to the same music. This allowed us to separate the effects of sharing a dance floor from the experience of dancing in sync.

In our study, we had pairs of participants listening to the same music, but we manipulated whether the music was on time by adding some delay to one of the channels. Even though they didn’t know we were manipulating the timing, we found that people preferred to hear the music in time with their dancing partner. They also looked at each other more when listening in sync.

This silent disco method has also been used in similar studies, in which researchers found that we remember people better if we simply dance in sync with them, and that synchronized dancing can also stimulate the endorphin system, which creates positive feelings.

Be together

People seem to like each other more when they move in sync. This is true in more naturalistic silent disco studies, but also in very basic experiments that simply involve synchronized finger tapping. The synchronization involved in music and dance may be the “active ingredient” in their social bonding effects.

Singing and dancing with others is a great way to promote synchrony, but it also exists in many types of social interactions.

Anyone who has experienced Zoom fatigue during the pandemic may have actually suffered from a slight time delay that interrupts the flow of the conversation and makes it difficult to be in sync, which can become quite frustrating and ultimately exhausting in an environment Zoom.

As live concerts have been replaced by livestreams during the Covid pandemic, some of my colleagues have even observed that livestreams foster a greater sense of social connection compared to pre-recorded concerts, in part because of the synchrony involved. There is something special about knowing that someone shares an experience with us over time, even if distance separates us.

Evolution of music

Some researchers have suggested that the social bonding effects of music and dance may have played an important role in the evolution of musicality.

They propose that being in sync with others helps reduce stress by releasing “feel-good” endorphins. Reducing other people’s stress makes them like you more, which can raise your social status, or even improve your chances of finding a partner – so people with better musical abilities might have more advancement success .

An alternative theory suggests that group synchronization may be a way of showing group strength to others, like a marching band in a military parade. These two seemingly competing theories might actually be complementary – although it’s very difficult to test this scientifically, because we obviously can’t replicate all of human evolution in the lab, so these debates may never be truly resolved.

One thing is certain: music and dance fulfill important social functions in society today. While many people around the world seem to suffer from loneliness, it is important to understand how people create and maintain social connections.

Group singing and dancing may have been the method of choice for our ancestors, as it still is for many people around the world today. However, if you plan to make friends on the dance floor, it might be best to ditch the headphones.

The writer is a postdoctoral researcher at the University of Oxford in the United Kingdom.

Republished from The Conversation

Published in Dawn, ICON, May 19, 2024