After pandemic lockdowns, isolation and frustration ease, singing out loud is the feel-good boost we all need (and science agrees)

Kathleen Barrett, who runs queer karaoke night at Tammy’s Wine Bar in Toronto, performs a song with Micaela Russell, on Aug. 21. Christopher Katsarov/The Globe and Mail

It was a hot summer night in July but that didn’t deter people from packing into Tammy’s Wine Bar & Cafe, a quaint new haunt in Toronto’s Parkdale neighbourhood. It was also a Sunday night, but the pull of karaoke was greater than that of resting up for the impending workweek.

A singer belted out a heartfelt cover of a song with their eyes closed, while most of the room sang along. Some people moved in sync; one audience member pointed at another while mouthing the lyrics; someone else had an arm slung around their buddy as they swayed together. Even the introverts in the corner participated, albeit with slightly less enthusiasm.

Karaoke, responsible for this palpable joy, is coming back. Deemed a high-risk activity during the pandemic, after a few karaoke nights were identified as superspreader events in Canada, karaoke was banned in British Columbia, Alberta, Saskatchewan and later Quebec, and measures were put in place in Ontario and PEI to limit the risks that karaoke posed.

But with provinces reopening, more venues have begun offering karaoke. Kathleen Barrett and Paula Haley Wilson started the queer karaoke Sunday night at Tammy’s called Everybody Flirts partly as an attempt to drum up business in the dead of winter and partly as a night for their friends, who all love karaoke. They now attract people who travel from out of town to attend.

Although on the surface, people were just singing and dancing along to prerecorded music, something more collective – bigger than any single song – was happening.

Perhaps music has always had this effect on us.

Research has shown that when we participate in music, dopamine and oxytocin – “feel-good hormones” – are released in our brains. Generally, our brains reward us with dopamine when we do things that benefit our survival, such as eating or having sex. Singing together has been shown to produce this high from the actual act of communal performance rather than just the music itself.

The question that scientists have been trying to answer is, why our brains would reward us for participating in music – what evolutionary purpose does this have?

There are different theories about why music developed among humans and across cultures, but the most supported one posits that music helped to create social cohesion and bonding. As groups of people who lived in close proximity started to increase, music was one way that these large groups could be brought together and work together, for example, to build something like the pyramids.

Cassandra McBride performs a song at Tammy’s Wine Bar. Christopher Katsarov/The Globe and Mail

The human ability to predict and follow rhythms helped us to work cohesively. “People can close their eyes and follow an internal pulse that’s shared by everybody,” explained Mark Whale, musician and professor of Liberal Studies at Humber College. “And it’s not just about following the beat. There seems to be something about collective music that immediately makes one feel good about oneself, and music does that immediately – cuts away the barriers – you’re singing the same song and you also feel this bond because of what’s going on in your brain. It connects back to infancy – music was one of the first ways we bonded with a caregiver.”

Karaoke, a combination of the Japanese words “empty” and “orchestra,” reflects its origins. The idea for a karaoke machine was first sparked when drummer and businessman Daisuke Inoue couldn’t attend an event and instead sent instrumental recordings of his songs on a tape recorder for his client to sing along to. After this success, Inoue then built the first karaoke machine in 1971.

Since then, karaoke has become popular around the world, spreading to North America in the 1990s, in bars and other settings – even being used as an ice-breaking activity in classrooms, as a tool for reading, or to speed up and build enthusiasm for people learning English. University of Oxford research has shown that although all group activities help to bring large groups of people together, singing bonds people more quickly, boosting feelings of closeness faster than other activities.

This might explain karaoke’s resurgence after pandemic lockdowns, as many of us look to reconnect socially after extended periods of isolation. Behavioural neuroscientist Amanda Wintink notes that “chronic stress damages the brain and music provides a non-drug-based relaxation tool that reduces cortisol – a powerful and damaging stress hormone that was chronically elevated during the pandemic.”

Karaoke is once again an activity where joy can be created and experienced together again – something we took for granted before. One Finnish study that asked people what karaoke singing means in their life found that the top reasons given were the “joy of being together,” getting away from everyday life, as well as the chance to create joy in the lives of others.

It is also not only about recovering joy but also about recovering time – connecting quickly.

“What warms my heart every week is seeing all of the collective joy, the confidence that the room inspires in people and being able to give each person who wants it a moment in the spotlight,” Barrett adds about the karaoke night she continues to hold.

Karaoke can have this equalizing effect: Everyone has an opportunity to get on stage and everyone gets applause after they sing; everyone, just by being there, is both an audience member and a participant – even if you don’t sing, you’re still a part of it. More often than not, who is singing doesn’t even matter, except for the rare occasion when an especially talented singer is up (often followed by collective empathy for the poor soul who goes up next).

Karaoke is also about travelling in time: singing the songs that kept us company when we were alone in our bedrooms during adolescence, when we were trying to find some answers, or at least comfort, in music; crying from heartbreak; longing for feelings we’d only seen in movies or heard in songs but not yet experienced in real life; maybe rocking out as a way to escape. The songs we sing at karaoke are odes to ourselves as much as to the icons who sang them originally.

Kyra Power performs with the stage name Grub Power. Christopher Katsarov/The Globe and Mail

Karen Tongson, scholar, cultural critic and author of Empty Orchestra: Karaoke, Queer Performance, Queer Theory, explained that “our relationships to pop music become nostalgic at a certain point in our lives and karaoke is an extension of that; we relate to song repertoires from when we were younger. Even contemporary music attends to those same feelings and sentiments for younger generations.”

But maybe this particularly egalitarian, joyful and sweet experience of karaoke is unique to my own experience at Tammy’s.

Tongson argued that although “there’s a lot of temptation to generalize about karaoke, it’s actually a very culturally and geographically contingent practice, with a different set of rituals depending where in the world it is and in each particular karaoke bar.” For example, Tongson explained, in Japan when karaoke is done as part of a ritual among business partners, there is a hierarchy of who gets to sing in what order.

So, our own personal experience of karaoke at any given establishment is largely, in Tongson’s words, “about how you’re feeling about your relationship to a particular space.”

If karaoke reflects our relationships to time and space, then I’m witnessing beautiful ones unfold.

Maybe karaoke’s best gift right now though is that, after years of being so deeply and painfully aware of each and every moment we lived through in isolation – every lockdown day, hour, minute – it can let us get lost in a moment again, a moment of connection, of joy, of something bigger than ourselves.

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