You’re the voice (a great karaoke song): why are we so afraid to sing?

If you’d like your workplace to completely fall apart, one thing you can do is to suggest doing team karaoke. You don’t even need to actually do the karaoke – just suggesting it is enough.

This is what I did last Christmas (which is, incidentally, an excellent karaoke song), when we were throwing around ideas for our end-of-year celebration.

In response, I was met with groans, wide-eyed horror, and a warning. “If we have to do karaoke,” one colleague (hi Bri!) said, “then I will simply resign.”

We celebrated with a pizza lunch instead. Bri is too valuable a team-member to lose.

“I really understand this reaction,” Katrina Rivera says when I bring up the karaoke. “It’s sad, but I used to feel like that, too. It’s a common response.”

And now Rivera is looking at why.

As part of her PhD at the ANU School of Medicine and Psychology, Rivera is researching music performance anxiety.

It’s a subject which has been well-studied in professional and student musicians, she says. Up on stage, and being evaluated on the skill and accuracy of their performance, they can understandably experience stress symptoms like a racing heart and trembling hands.

But Rivera has found that a kind of music performance anxiety exists in the general population too, only it looks different. It’s not performance stress so much as total performance avoidance. As in, I’d rather resign than sing.

In a recent study of over 100 people about their personal definitions of music-making, Rivera found that among participants who didn’t have musical training, there was a pervasive feeling that they didn’t have ‘permission’ to perform music in public.

These people reported enjoying music and even making music – just so long as no-one can hear them.

“There’s so much judgement about music ingrained into our society, even in the amateur context, it’s expected that if you’re performing, you’re going to be perfect, otherwise you will be judged.”

As a result, many people will choose simply not to perform music at all.

“Even when singing ‘Happy Birthday’, which is an example of the smallest amount of public singing we have, some people will mouth along because they’re afraid they’re not doing it right.”

Rivera knows all about it, she says.

“When I was about ten years’ old, I was singing and something negative was said to me. After that, I did not sing again until I came to the ANU School of Music and we were required to do some aural training.

“It’s so tough to get over things like that.”

Rivera, who is now a piano teacher with a Bachelor of Music (Honours) from ANU, believes the solution is to make more space in our society for non-judgemental music-making.

“We have this situation where we don’t tend to make music in our daily lives, so the only place we usually find music making is in education.

“And in our music education system, there’s so much evaluation built in: lessons tend to be telling people what they’ve got wrong and what they need to do to make it better.”

She describes having a revelatory experience watching children perform in front of elderly audiences at nursing homes, as part of the Music Engagement Program which originated at ANU.

“I was seeing these kids stand up and sing alone and with no anxiety at all, and it was incredible,” she remembers. “I wanted to work out how I could bring that to my piano students, and that’s how I got into the research side of things.”

Key to that performance, Rivera says, was that there was no evaluation. The aim was simply to encourage the aged-care residents to open up and sing along too.

“The kids were performing purely to help other people make music. The focus on whether they were singing the notes correctly had been taken away. So it’s not about you; it’s about what you’re giving to others.

“Unfortunately, in our society at the moment, this isn’t the usual way of doing things. Performing opportunities seem only to be for people on the professional pathway. You go and hide away in a practice room until you get to a certain level, and get it right, and only then are you welcomed to perform in public.

“There aren’t many places for amateurs to get together and make music together at any level, without fear of judgement.”

So what does she recommend for someone like my karaoke-averse colleague who wants to rediscover their voice?

First, give yourself permission to make music, she says. It’s not something available to only a select, highly-trained few, but an innate, universal human desire.

“And then, just sing!” she says.

“The safest place to start is wherever you feel most comfortable. For some people, this might be by yourself, like in the shower, and for others this could be singing with a large group, like at a concert. From there, you might start to feel comfortable singing with other kinds of smaller groups.”

And for those people who say they really can’t hold a tune, she has just one question:

“Why does it matter? If you enjoy singing, you should sing!”

This article first appeared at ANU College of Science.