From an interesting NPR article, here’s Brian Eno on singing as a path to happiness:
Singing aloud leaves you with a sense of levity and contentedness. And then there are what I would call “civilizational benefits.” When you sing with a group of people, you learn how to subsume yourself into a group consciousness because a capella singing is all about the immersion of the self into the community. That’s one of the great feelings — to stop being me for a little while and to become us. That way lies empathy, the great social virtue.
Barry and Jackie are members of a community singing group. Barry can’t carry a tune in a bucket – he thought – and last week he sang a chant in Swahili to his grandson, which brought tears to my eyes. With many voices, that chant would be powerfully entraining. With many voices, a capella, I think it would take the singers out of this world. Spider Robinson’s description in Time Pressure of an OM event captures something of this.