Singing Medicine

Sumugan Sivanesan is an artistic researcher, writer and broadcaster whose interests include: music, minority politics, activist media, artist infrastructures and more-than-human rights. Sumugan earned a doctorate from the Transforming Cultures research centre at the University of Technology Sydney (2014) and was a post-doctoral researcher at the Institute for English and American Studies (Cultural Studies), University of Potsdam (2016) supported by the German Academic Exchange Service (DAAD). He was a fellow at the Jan van Eyck Academie, 2022-23. https://sivanesan.net/

What goes on in the back of a car?

Tina Coupé is a mobile party machine, pop-up karaoke booth and participatory art intervention devised by Berlin-based artists Lola Göller and Flavio Degen. Where ever it pulls up, bystanders, interlopers and art goers are invited to sing along with karaoke videos that they have likely never seen before. These music videos, made in collaboration with artists and communities, have evolved since the Covid pandemic when friends would get together to sing online. Tina Coupé adopts the phenomenon of karaoke as a globalized, cross-cultural and popular social practice, to address issues of space, accessibility and economic precariousness and it chimes with my interests in the social function and health benefits of singing.

Karaoke is a form of musical entertainment that emerged in Japan in the 1970s. It is a compound word that translates as “empty orchestra”: karappo (empty) + ōkesutora (orchestra). The first karaoke machine, the Juke-8 invented by Daisuke Inoue in 1971, was “a technological mash-up” assembled from parts stripped from a bass guitar amplifier, a coin-operated vending machine and a car stereo 8-track cassette player. In the 1980s, karaoke machines developed alongside video technologies, moving from tape to disc and gaining popularity in South East Asia, notably China and the Philippines. As we know, karaoke has since spread around the world becoming the global phenomenon it is today, and these days one can simply type in the name of their desired song “+ karaoke” into a search engine and likely find something suitable to sing along to.

In his 2006 book This Is Your Brain on Music, Daniel J. Levitin, a North American cognitive neuroscientist, author, musician and sound engineer, notes that it is only relatively recently that a distinction was made between classes of music performers and music listeners. That is, those who are gifted, trained and professionalized and those who are cast as audiences, admirers and connoisseurs. As a neuroscientist, Levitin has researched how music alters our moods and brain chemistry, citing studies that demonstrate how music stimulates all areas of the brain. Indeed, in his 2008 book The World in Six Songs, he argues that the human brain evolved with song. Before there was language, our brains did not have the full capacity to learn language, to speak or to represent it. As our brains developed both the physiological and cognitive flexibility to manipulate symbols, language emerged gradually, and the use of rudimentary verbalizations—grunts, calls, shrieks, and groans—further stimulated the growth potential for the types of neural structures that would support language in the broadest sense.

Health researchers are also aware of the merits of singing and recommend it to manage chronic pain and speech disorders and to improve mental health. According to Lyz Cooper, psychologist, author and ambient music composer who founded the British Academy of Sound Therapy in 2000, scientifically confirmed benefits of singing include: reducing stress, improving one’s immune system and slowing down aging! She reports that singing, alongside dancing and drumming, cause our bodies to release endorphins, which have the effect of reducing pain and lifting one’s mood.

She also remarks that these findings correspond to those of the Vedic sciences and its “singing medicine,” notably the use of mantras and pranayama breathing techniques, that have been practiced in India for thousands of years.

Kulreet Chaudhary, neurologist, Ayurvedic practitioner, author and advocate for “acoustic medicine”, is concerned about the gap between what is discovered via scientific research and the treatments deployed by medical practitioners. In her book Sound Medicine (2020) she complains about medical practitioners’ “myopic pragmatism” as they are steered to prescribe only treatments covered by insurance. She criticizes the medical science community’s resistance to accepting practical results and findings backed up by statistics, yet cannot be explained by “an acceptable biological mechanism”. Both Chaudhary and Cooper urge the medical sector to widen their understanding of the body and health and expand the range of treatments deployed to promote healing and ensure well-being, including singing.

The Finnish ethnomusicologist, musician and therapist Anne Tarvainen works with both amateur and professional singers who experience difficulty vocalizing, due to illness, trauma or physical capacities. She expands on the work of the North American philosopher Richard Shusterman (2012) who has been developing the interdisciplinary and transcultural field of “somaesthetics” since the 1990s, combining words derived from Greek: soma for body and aesthetics for perception. Shusterman, who is also a Feldenkrais practitioner, emphasizes that our experiences of the world are always embodied—that our bodies are our indispensable “tool of tools”. Thus improving bodily perception, performance and presentation comprises an “art of living” that benefits one’s quality of life.

Tarvainen is developing a branch of this field as “vocal somaesthetics” in conjunction with a form of vocal therapy she names “Voicefulness.” Concerned with bodily and experiential aspects of vocalizing and listening, Tarvainen encourages her clients to use their voices to become aware of their bodies rather than adhering to music conventions or submitting to performance pressures. Such unorthodox singing is a means of “sounding out” and transforming the body. It is a way of doing the body that is attentive to the field of relations in which it is enmeshed; singing as somatechnics.

Daisuke Inoue, who was awarded an Ig Nobel Prize from Harvard University in 2004 for his karaoke invention, is also aware of a link between singing and health. He recalls:

So, if singing feels good, makes us smarter and alerts us to power relations, shouldn’t we karaoke everyday?

Die tägliche Dosis Karaoke beim Supergau

Mehrfach täglich Happy Hour in der Disco Coupé zwischen 23. Mai und 1. Juni: Alles über das Projekt und alle Termine

Im Vorfeld des Festivals haben Lola Göller und Flavio Degen mit Jugendlichen aus dem Pinzgau gearbeitet. Magdalena Pfeffer hat auf meinbezirk.at darüber berichtet >>>hier geht’s zum Artikel mit Video

References

Chaudhary, Kulreet, 2020. Sound Medicine: How to Use the Ancient Science of Sound to Heal the Body and Mind, Harper Wave, New York.

Cooper, Lyz, 2020. “Your Healing Voice – The benefits of singing for health and wellbeing,” The British Academy of Sound Therapy. https://britishacademyofsoundtherapy.com/wp-content/uploads/2020/07/Your-Healing-Voice-Article-sing-for-health-research-3.pdf

Faye, Ndéla, 2021. ‘Different Routes: The power of singing’, Kone Foundation: Different Routes, 4 September. https://koneensaatio.fi/en/different-routes/
Inoue, Daisuke & Scott, Robert, 2013. “Voice Hero: The Inventor of Karaoke Speaks,” The Appendix, 3 December. http://theappendix.net/issues/2013/10/voice-hero-the-inventor-of-karaoke-speaks
Levitin, Daniel J., 2008. The World In Six Songs: How the Musical Brain Created Human Nature, Penguin Group USA.

Levitin, Daniel J., 2006. This Is Your Brain On Music: The Science of a Music Obsession, Penguin Group USA.

Rafferty, Brian, 2008. Don’t Stop Believing: How Karaoke Conquered the World and Changed My Life, Da Capo Press, Philadelphia.

Shusterman, Richard, 2012. Thinking Through the Body: Essays in Somaesthetics, Cambridge University Press, New York.

Tarvainen, Anne, 2018. “Singing, Listening, Proprioceiving: Some Reflections on Vocal Somaesthetics.” In: Richard Shusterman (ed). Aesthetic Experience and Somaesthetics, pp.120–142,  Brill, Lieden.