“We’ll All Shout Together in That Morning”: Entrainment and Community in the Toronto Shape Note Singing Group

Abstract

This dissertation explores entrainment in Sacred Harp singing using an ethnographic examination of the Toronto Shape Singing Note group. It is accompanied by a qualitative exploration of interpersonal synchrony and affiliation among group members and examines what happens when interpersonal synchrony is destabilized during the COVID-19 pandemic. Entrainment “describes the interaction and consequent synchronization of two or more processes or oscillators.” (Will 2004, 1) Identified first in 1665 by Dutch Physicist Christiaan Huygens, entrainment theory has since been applied widely in mathematics and in the physical, biological and social sciences. Despite obvious applications within the study of music the concept of entrainment has only recently begun to be explored in ethnomusicology. In 2004, Martin Clayton, Rebecca Sager and Udo Will presented an overview of the concept and called for its use in ethnomusicology. They note that there are four modes of data collection that are available to ethnomusicologists when discussing this phenomenon: Ethnographic examination and introspection, musical sound, visible physical behavior (gesture), and physiological processes (heart rate, respiration, brain waves, etc). (Will 2004, 23-24) This project employs the first, second and third modes of data collection and argues that ethnomusicologists can presume the existence of entrainment simply through ethnographic observation. A growing body of research has shown that interpersonal entrainment increases prosocial behavior among those who engage with one another synchronously. (Cirelli, Wan & Trainor, 2014; Trainor, Cirelli, 2015) Using an ethnographic examination of the Toronto Shape Note Singing Group I propose that singing Sacred Harp music increases feelings of affiliation and pro-social behaviour among singers and promotes feelings of affiliation across socio-political bounds.