No matter what your personal experience is, music serves as a universal language. You may not have an expertise in music but you can still identify with the melody, harmony, rhythm, and lyrics. Music brings people together as a community and nation. It connect and motivates us. As one of my resident’s at Providence Manor stated, “Music is the key to well being. It’s a great language that can be transferred from one group to another. Even if they don’t know the language they know music.”
Anthony Storr, in his book Music and the Mind, stresses that in all societies there is a primary function of music, which is collective and communal, to bring and bind people together. People sing and dance together in every culture and one can imagine them having done so around the first fires years and years ago. We have gone to concerts, church, music festivals to re-experience music as a social activity. It is difficult to remain detached, to resist being drawn into the rhythm of chanting, singing, or dancing. Rhythm and its entrainment of movement, its power to move people in synchrony, may well have had crucial cultural and economic function in human evolution, bringing people together, producing a sense of collectivity and community.
Livingstone and Thompson proposed a theory of musical origins in which music is conceived by the ability and motivation to attune to and influence the affective states of other humans. Music can influence arousal and mood states and sharing these affective experiences may enhance social bonds. Affective engagement is not unique to music. It is also observed across many nonmusical and non-auditory domains, including tone of voice, facial expressions, gestures and body language, dance, theatre, and visual arts. All musical experiences do involve a core affective dimension and it is this dimension that allows music to function flexibly over a wide range of contexts such as rituals, funerals, religious ceremonies, and social gatherings. Cultures have got into a rhythm with their people, the way they perform certain rituals and traditions have become apart of their lifestyle.
It is pretty incredible to look across the country and see music being engrained within culture. Religious and social ceremonies in some cultures are characterized by coordinated rhythmic activities including drumming, clapping, chanting, and singing that may continue for several hours.
Cultural diversity in rhythm is evident in a number of performance features; such as the type of performing, how fast or slow the music is, the style of dance steps and patterns, and use of gesture in acting. When anthropologists study music performance they may examine it in terms of how it functions as a social catharsis, in the transmission of beliefs and maintenance of social cohesion, with the use of time and rhythm.
To the people of West Africa a drum beat is the same as heartbeat. We respond immediately, and we respond in different ways. Rhythm is shared among all people but every person has their own, unique rhythm because we are all different. Life has a rhythm, it’s constantly moving. It is a world that encompasses so much more than drumming, dancing or sound. It’s found in every part of daily life.