I actually love going to the club alone; early on a Friday night, I’ll put on my cross-body bag, lock my bike outside, grab my earplugs, and get ready to transcend—there’s no one to worry about but me. Sometimes I’m the first person on the floor, self-conscious and clumsy, closing my eyes to stay in the moment, but the feeling always fades; as the set goes on and the floor fills out, I become anonymous, one body in a swarm of bodies. That’s the part I love: disappearing into anonymity, losing myself in the euphoria of the crowd. The club, pulsing with motion and obscured by fog, becomes a shared meditation. You can find this feeling of togetherness on a Friday night like I do, or singing in a choir or, chanting together, or cheering at a game. The key is that it feels good to become a part of everyone else. That quasi-spiritual, transcendent feeling, of blurring the boundaries between self and other, is called Collective Effervescence.

In 1912, Emile Durkheim was trying to explain why we believe in God. A staunch agnostic, he believed that the root of religiosity was not mystic or pre-ordained. Instead, he sought a social rationale and theoretical foundation we could use to examine all religions, despite their apparent differences. He found the answer in collective ritual: rites and traditions that bound Catholics in Medieval Europe, Totemic societies in Australia, and in his father’s work as a Rabbi.

He was repeatedly perplexed by why people chose to believe—was it a true faith in God? Or was it something else that drew them to worship? In searching for the divine, he focused on the enigmatic feeling of transcendence, of dissolving the self and joining with others through religious experience. In his book, Elementary Forms of Religious Life, Durkheim outlined a dichotomy of human activity, split between the sacred and the profane; where the former is a shared activity held in religious reverence, the latter describes everyday pastimes. Across cultures, he proposed that sacred pursuits were something done together. "A religion," Durkheim wrote, "is a unified system of beliefs and practices relative to sacred things, that is to say, things set apart and forbidden—beliefs and practices which unite into a single moral community called a Church, all those who adhere to them."

He reasoned that this form of religious worship was “not incoherent or fantastical” but a logical summation of society’s desire to worship itself, and in this case, that “the collective consciousness is the highest form of the psychic life, since it is the consciousness of the consciousnesses.” In the century since, sociologists and psychologists have attempted to observe these theories in the real world, translating intellectual concepts into quantifiable phenomena. Despite the idea’s widespread popularity, there’s a relative dearth of documentation that explicitly measures its effect; the most salient sociological research examines related theories of micro-interaction. Theories on collective effervescence focus on groups and propose that social emotions are the “glue” of solidarity and the “energy” mobilizing change and conflict. ​​Some researchers have concluded that empathetic projection is responsible for the unified feeling of togetherness, in peoples’ attempt to "align their relevant cognitive states.” Organizational psychologists and social scientists use frameworks like behavioral synchrony, emotional contagion, and identity reinforcement to describe the scientific roots of an ostensibly social theory. While the idea first originated in religious study, it’s a useful tool for interpreting our experience of an increasingly secular world, where technology overuse, social polarization, and economic precarity preclude genuine human connection.

When people were forced apart during the pandemic, leaving their rituals severed from togetherness, this idea enjoyed a revival, making its way into think pieces and cultural conversation. Organizational psychologist Adam Grant wrote in the New York Times that “there’s a specific kind of joy we’ve been missing.” He described it, very broadly, as “the synchrony you feel when you slide into rhythm with strangers on a dance floor, colleagues in a brainstorming session, cousins at a religious service or teammates on a soccer field.” In a 2017 article for The Cut, journalist Drake Baer proposed that protest, parties, and sports games all fill a distinctly human need for connection, that “contagious euphoria…​​where your sense of self slackens, yielding to a connection with your fellow, synchronized humans.”

In a 2019 study, researchers found that 75% of people experienced a form of collective effervescence once a week, and one-third felt it at least once a day. Notably, the study had a loose definition of togetherness, and focused on everyday activities that aroused a sense of group connectedness, insisting that the feeling is “not exclusively an extraordinary and rare occurrence.” Because humans are “fundamentally and inextricably social,” collective effervescence may be understood as a casual, universal phenomenon. To demonstrate, social psychologist Shira Gabriel, developed the scale, ‘Tendency for Effervescent Assembly Measure,’ (TEAM), which measures incidences of communal experience and daily connectedness. It suggests that the phenomenon combines a “connection to others and a sensation of sacredness; that collective effervescence is experienced in common, everyday kinds of events; and that experiences of collective effervescence are related to positive outcomes such as life satisfactions, a feeling of awe, social connection, and perceived meaning in life.” While I’d hazard that most people do not feel transcendence at the office, togetherness does work in mysterious ways.

Contemporary research on this phenomenon has focused on quotidian group activities, unique experiential events, or dance and ritual movements. Collective effervescence stems from things you do and see—but is it also something you hear?

Among the countless social media trends that proliferated during the pandemic, one was surprisingly popular considering its archaic context. Sea shanties, the traditional songs that sailors sang to pass the time on their ships, blew up on TikTok as people duetted each other creating an unpredictably euphoric choral arrangement and gaining millions of likes.

The trend’s most popular song, an 1860’s ballad called “The Wellerman,” may have caught on for its catchy hook alone. But science journalist Leigh Cowart suggested that it was more likely an antidote to the intense social isolation of the pandemic. They wrote on Twitter, “sea shanties are popular right now because behavioral synchrony feels really, really good to humans and many of us have been social distancing for months and deprived of this.”

Collective effervescence is a particular subset of what we broadly refer to as behavioral synchrony. Neuroscientist Ilanit Gordon, author of The Biology of Bonding, described interpersonal synchrony as the “spontaneous rhythmic coordination of actions, emotions, thoughts, and physiological processes across time between two or more individuals.” It could describe parent-baby playtime, or clapping your hands in unison with others; it’s a sense of connection that scales. In these moments, humans experience an array of biological changes: an elevated level of hormones like oxytocin and cortisol, shifts in the autonomic nervous system like a faster heart rate, and activation of neural networks like the empathy system.

The Sea Shanties offer us a glimpse of behavioral synchrony, inspiring intense emotional reactions even as observers. The YouTube comments for this particular version of the Wellerman are flooded with heartfelt reactions of tenderness, exhilaration, and awe. I’m really not a theater kid, but I’ll admit that when I first heard it, I felt the same heightened adrenaline and emotional connection that these users describe (partially aided by an insane EDM production). The video, posted just over a year ago, has accrued 19,384,619 views. Users are touched by the synchrony they witness, and in doing so, connect to something larger than themselves.

Singing is a particularly effective conduit for this form of cognitive alignment. It signals an intentional departure from casual speech and communicates emotions like grief or euphoria. Research psychologist and expressive arts therapist Cathy Malchiodi writes that singing offers “expressive and somatosensory work [that] purposively supports synchrony...the inherent harmony induced by these experiences, of being in a group in similar rhythm and cadence together, brings greater emotional closeness and rapport. It is a form of co-regulation that reinforces a sense of safety, comfort, and connection.” Some scientists posit that group singing was “a crucial factor of early hominid physical survival,” because it helped humans “make strong social bonds, express their identity, and attract a mate” in addition to “stor[ing] absolute pitch information for signals and sound patterns that were necessary for communication and survival.” Sing-along’s are genetically encoded and evolutionary advantageous.

Social media-powered sea shanty revivals aside, collective effervescence is most potent in person, and most palpable in a unified crowd. Researchers suggest “the affective arousal of an assembled crowd creates the potential for both social conformity and group-based agency,” seemingly regardless of its purpose.  In this curated video of the greatest concert sing-alongs of all time, 10,000-person stadiums shout the words back to artists on stage, creating a collective performance. After all, the crowd is what makes a concert special—connecting with others through music; the song you love becomes everyone’s song. In a study, cheekily titled, “The Lonely Raver,” researchers found that this sense of unity could even be found, albeit less intensely, in pandemic-era concert livestreams where viewers could see attendance counts.

Collective effervescence isn’t just for fun. In the summer of 2020, as Black Lives Matter protests erupted across the country, demonstrators participated in collective chants. Leaders taught simple call-and-response techniques, while protesters collectively exercised their voice, in what would become America’s largest protest movement. According to Interaction Ritural Theory, the protests were energizing because they created “symbols of group membership and pump[ed] up individuals with emotional energy," and offered People Power you could hear.

In one study, researchers documented collective effervescence in marches for International Women’s Day across Latin America, where demonstrators protested sexism, gendered violence, and femicide. The researchers observed “collective and ritualized feminist actions,” how those affected “behavioral and attentional synchrony, perceived emotional synchrony, and positive and transcendent emotions,” and then correlated their findings to “personal well-being, collective well-being, collective efficacy, and behavioral intention to support the fight for women’s rights.” They found that demonstrations measurably contributed to a sense of heightened group identity.

A 2015 study conducted longitudinal observations of positively valenced gatherings, like folkloric marches, and negatively valenced gatherings, like political demonstrations. They found that both types of “collective gatherings consistently strengthened collective identity, identity fusion, and social integration, as well as enhancing personal and collective self-esteem and efficacy, positive affect, and positive social beliefs among participants.” No matter its purpose, people can get swept up in the intoxicating feeling of a crowd. In a 2018 paper, one researcher studying the massive protests against public budget cuts in the 2011 Wisconsin Uprising, also found that shared group affiliation wasn’t a prerequisite for collective effervescence.

And, of course, collective effervescence hasn’t abandoned its religious origins. As music journalist Nyshka Chandran illustrated in her ‘Aural Perspective of Islam & Hinduism,’ voices that merge can be haunting, intoxicating, and mesmerizing. In this YouTube video, which captured a 2015 Muharram ceremony in Delhi, India, Shia Muslim devotees sing in a deep, baritone unison and thump their chests in synchrony. The effect is like one shimmering body of sound. It’s as close as we get to God.

As the world grows less religious, collective effervescence has taken on new shapes, permeating New Age thinking, sports psychology, organizational behavior, political theory, and the renewed interest in psychedelic medicine. What we don’t get at church, we find in stadium concerts, music festivals, live streams, TikTok videos, and protests. Pursuing community is part of being human, and collective effervescence proposes that we can find transcendence right here on Earth. It’s the sound of human voices. If you listen, you can feel it.