You Don’t Know What You’ve Got Till It’s Gone: What Do Choir Members Miss When They Can No Longer Sing Together?

Abstract

Research examining participation in community choirs suggests that group singing provides choir members with benefits including emotion-regulation, increased positive affect, and reduced stress, as well as social benefits like feelings of support, trust, safety, and connection. During the COVID-19 pandemic community choirs were forced to discontinue in-person rehearsals to avoid spread of the virus. The current study focuses on one such community choir in London, UK, which moved from an in-person format to an online format during the pandemic. Interviews were conducted with ten members of the choir, five of whom continued participating in online rehearsals and five of whom did not. Interviews were analyzed using Thematic Analysis to explore the aspects of in-person choir participation that were most missed as well as the aspects that could not be satisfactorily replicated online. Participants explicitly mentioned that they missed being able to blend their voices with others and reported that singing in the physical presence of the rest of the choir had more emotional impact than what they experienced online. While some participants continued with these online rehearsals, others did not because they missed in-person elements of the choir enough that they lost motivation to take part online. The results of this study highlight the psychological, emotional, and social benefits of choir rehearsals taking place in person and suggest that there are fundamental aspects of group singing that cannot be reproduced in an online context.