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We sometimes talk about the music has being almost magical – because we can feel how it affects us and yet it’s so hard to pin down how or why. But for the earliest humans, music must have seemed magical for much more practical reasons. A group of prehistoric men trying to drag a mammoth carcass back to the caves might have found it too heavy, until someone got the idea of synchronizing everyone’s movements. And how did they do that? By using rhythm.

No one really knows how music started, but I’m willing to bet that using rhythm to coordinate movements is probably one of the oldest forms of music humans have. It’s why we have work songs in every culture – songs for rigging ships, weaving fabrics, pounding rice, and marching in an army. A new Stanford University study (Synchrony and Cooperation, see link below) suggests that “synchrony” – rhythmic acts like dancing, marching, and singing – strengthen a sense of community, and of putting a group’s needs before one’s own. This conclusion is made without any mention of good or bad; it just is. Of course it can be bad – lots of dictators have propped themselves up with patriotic music and tightly-controlled armies, and isn’t it funny how the most in-sync marching seems to come from the armies of the most repressive regimes? But it shows that music does have some kind of power that seems to be inborn in our species. And that is magic.

Tell us: Where have you experienced “synchrony”? Doing the wave at a ballgame? Singing at church? Pogoing up and down at a rock concert? Did that make you feel part of a bigger community?
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