Music is more than entertainment. Across spiritual traditions, it’s one of the most powerful ways we shape our inner lives, tend to heartbreak and hope, and feel connected to one another and something bigger than ourselves. Whether we’re listening alone through headphones or raising our voices together, music forms us emotionally, socially, and spiritually.
This briefing explores what spiritual innovators can learn from research about how music works in gatherings and meaning-making experiences. We’ll look at how music can calm us, connect us, and help us experience transcendence.
Music can usher us toward sacred moments, open space for lament or joy, and generate the emotions that mark life’s biggest rites of passage. It helps us imagine and reimagine community, offering both refuge and transformation. If you use music regularly in your work, or if you’re nervous to introduce it—we hope this proves a valuable resource for your leadership!
Tip 1: Play Music to Cultivate Calm
If you want to cultivate a shared state of reflection or calm, turn to music. Even passive listening lowers our stress and changes our body’s nervous system.
According to psychologists Robert Ellis and Julian F. Thayer, music engages the autonomic nervous system as a complex “sounding board,” triggering different emotional and physical reactions and, often, helping us transition from a “fight or flight” state to a calmer “rest and digest” mode.1 This means that playing music can cultivate a space for richer engagement amidst conflict, for example—one reason that social movements often use singing in the midst of tense decisions or discussions.
Music’s effect on the autonomic nervous system may stem, in part, from its influence on breathing. In one experimental study, Luciano Bernardi, a Professor of Internal Medicine, and colleagues measured the cardiovascular and respiratory functions of 24 men as they listened to different styles of music.2 Their findings suggest that slower music encourages slower breathing and a more relaxed emotional state, with pauses within and between pieces of music calming listeners even further.
Tip 2: De-Stress by Making Music, Together
While passive listening positively impacts the body’s stress response, so, too, does actively making music together.
Research on musicians shows that music-making can influence levels of cortisol (often called the “stress hormone”). In an experiment, U.K. scientists studied nearly 200 cancer-impacted choristers, measuring cortisol levels both before and after choir rehearsal.3 Their findings point to a clear relationship between choral singing and reduced stress: after just one hour of singing together, participants’ cortisol levels dropped.
Other studies connect music’s stress-buffering effects to oxytocin, sometimes called the “love hormone.” One such investigation is musicologist Gunter Kreutz’s research with amateur German choral singers.4 In his experiment, oxytocin levels were measured across two situations: before and after a 30-minute choir rehearsal, and before and after an informal conversation with another choir member. Remarkably, oxytocin increased only during group singing—not during ordinary social interaction. In other words, collective music-making seems to ease long-term stress through a distinct form of social bonding.
Tip 3: Want People To Connect? Help People Move and Sing
But what makes social bonding through music so distinctive?
Drawing on insights from psychology and anthropology, Bronwyn Tarr, Jacques Launay, and Robin Dunbar point to music’s clear, predictable rhythms.5 As we listen to, sing, or make music together, we naturally synchronize our movements, matching pace and effort. While this coordination is often unconscious, it grows as we begin to sense and anticipate one another’s actions. And, as we move together, endorphins are released, social distinctions lessen, and we experience a sense of shared identity—or what researchers call “self-other merging.”
In their observational study of the American religious folk tradition Sacred Harp singing, musician Anne Heider and sociologist R. Stephen Warner underscore the body’s role in group-based musical connection.6 They describe how tightly-packed seating arrangements, face-to-face positioning, and shared focus on a central song leader and hymnal help transform ideologically diverse singers into a unified, self-aware community.
Simply put, rather than focusing on people sharing stories or meeting everyone in a room—try moving to a beat or singing together. Synchronizing bodies is a wonderfully efficient way of creating a shared sense of “us.”
Tip 4: Create Collective Transcendence Through Music
The sociological concept of collective effervescence—the shared emotion and energy created in group gatherings—also applies to Sacred Harp singing, which produces feelings of joy and exhilaration.
Experimental research by social-psychologist Nicole Koefler and partners indicates that it’s music, not just co-presence, that sparks these feelings. Through studies of live music events, they show that the collective effervescence generated by music can linger, influencing happiness and meaning-making long after an event’s end.7
Collective effervescence can also unlock experiences of transcendence. In his observational research on the African American gospel tradition, anthropologist Glenn Hinson observed and interviewed the “saints”—Christian believers gathered to celebrate the anniversary of a local gospel duo, the Branchettes, in a small rural North Carolina church.8 According to Hinson, singing helped participants focus their individual attention on praise while also uniting them in sound and motion. Through the shared intensity generated, singers opened the door to transcendent communion, inviting and experiencing the Spirit’s indwelling and making God real.
Music In Practice
Gaia Music Collective gathers people together for collective singing experiences that leave participants feeling meaningfully connected. Hosting candlelight circle sings, half-day choirs to learn the latest pop songs arranged in six-part harmony, or helping people write music and practice protest songs—Gaia successfully undoes some of the fears that people have about singing together by nixing the language of “rehearsal” and “practice” and instead focusing on games, connective check-ins, and lots of kindness. There’s no performance—it’s all about participation. Today, Gaia has over one million followers online; a clear indicator that people want to sing together!
Tip 5: Use Music to Bridge the Sacred and Secular
While the saints believe that transcendent gospel singing depends on understanding the Bible, ethnomusicologist Katherine Hagedorn’s Internet-based ethnography on global music consumption suggests that music can foster transcendent experiences even outside of its original religious context.9 Studying the ecstatic musical traditions of Indo-Pakistani Sufism (specifically qawwali) and Afro-Cuban Ocha (including tambores and batá drumming), she shows how the repetitive rhythms that call forth the divine among spiritual insiders also shape the experiences of spiritual outsiders. For these listeners, music still facilitates transcendence, but it’s experienced and expressed in more secular terms (e.g., a sense of release or relief from despair).
In her multi-method study of the persistent popularity of Choral Evensong in England even as Anglican Church attendance has declined, musicologist Kathryn King characterizes music as a “transformative practice.”10 According to King, while people attend Evensong for a variety of reasons, they’re always drawn by the expectation of a deeply meaningful and moving encounter. Sometimes that encounter brings tranquility and calm; at other times it yields transcendent experiences of insight or detachment; at still other times it generates feelings of refuge and safety. For King, it’s both the character of Evensong (i.e., its regular, free, daily schedule; its rhythmic chanting and setting; etc.) and the ways listeners prepare themselves and focus their attention that produce these effects—and point to broader lessons about the role of music in spiritual life.
Further Reading
Becker, J. (2004). Deep listeners: Music, emotion, and trancing. Indiana University Press. A text offering keen insights into connections between emotional reactions to music and religious trance.
Chorus America. (2009). The chorus impact study: How children, adults, and communities benefit from choruses. An important evaluation of the psycho-social benefits of choral singing.
Da Fonseca-Wollheim, C. (2026, February 10). What happens in a performer’s brain while playing music? The New York Times. An article exploring novel experimental research in neuroscientific studies of music.
DeNora, T. (2000). Music in everyday life. Cambridge University Press. A fascinating exploration of the ways we use music to support our objectives and goals.
Durkheim, E. (1995). The elementary forms of religious life (K. E. Fields, Trans.). Free Press. (Original work published 1912). The text that introduced the concept of “collective effervescence."
Greenberg, D. Dr. David Greenberg. A robust website collating the research publications (and more!) of a noted psychologist/neuroscientist who studies music’s extensive impacts.
McDowell, A. (2014). Warriors and terrorists: Antagonism as strategy in Christian hardcore and Muslim “Taqwacore” punk rock. Qualitative Sociology, 27, 255-276. An important article on how Christian and Muslim youth engage punk rock to carve out new religious spaces and identities in the U.S.
St John, G. (Ed.). (2004). Rave culture and religion. Routledge. A wide-ranging book that frames technocultural music and dance as spiritual developments.
Footnotes
1 Ellis, R. J., & Thayer, J. F. (2010, April). Music and autonomic nervous system (dys)function. Music Perception, 27(4), 317-326.
2 Bernardi, L., Porta, C., & Sleight, P. (2006). Cardiovascular, cerebrovascular, and respiratory changes induced by different types of music in musicians and non-musicians: the importance of silence. Heart, 92, 445-452.
3 Faincourt, D., Williamson, A., Carvalho, L. A., et al. (2016, April 5). Singing modulates mood, stress, cortisol, cytokine and neuropeptide activity in cancer patients and carers. Ecancermedicalscience, 10, article 631.
4 Kreutz, G. (2014). Does singing facilitate social bonding? Music & Medicine, 6(2), 51-60.
5 Tarr, B., Launay, J., & Dunbar, R. I. M. (2014, September 30). Music and social bonding: “Self-other” merging and neurohormonal mechanisms. Frontiers in Psychology, 5, Article 1096.
6 Heider, A., & Warner, R. S. (2010). Bodies in synch: Interaction ritual theory applied to Sacred Harp singing. Sociology of Religion, 71(1), 76-97.
7 Koefler, N., Naidu, E. Gabriel, S., et al. (2026, March). Let the music play: Live music fosters collective effervescence and leads to lasting positive outcomes. Personality and Social Psychology Bulletin, 52(3), 546-558.
8 Hinson, G. (2010). Fire in my bones: Transcendence and the holy spirit in African American gospel. University of Pennsylvania Press.
9 Hagedorn, K. (2006, December). “From this one song alone, I consider him to be a holy man”: Ecstatic religion, musical affect, and the global consumer. Journal for the Scientific Study of Religion, 45 (4), 489-496.
10 King, K. (2022). Tranquility, transcendence, and retreat: The transformative practice of listening at Evensong [Doctoral dissertation, University of Oxford]. Oxford University Research Archive.
