Who doesn't love to sing? Even in the shower or in the car. Have you ever found yourself singing along to the car radio only to find someone adjacent to you in a traffic jam looking at you oddly? Perhaps that only happened to me. Twice. Well fortunately our Happiness group decided upon a Karaoke evening to practice the art of connecting. ‘Any excuse to sing’ I thought. However crooning along to the likes of a Whitney Houston track is not all that we achieved at our month 3 Happiness meet-up.
Research shows that singing improves your health and wellbeing. It eases anxiety and soothes your soul. It's often used with various groups to help recall. Connecting through singing can conjure up so many memories that Alzheimer's patients are given the opportunity to try and remember experiences associated with various tracks. Singing is also known to bring people together and so it did earlier this week.
Karaoke is very different from how I remember it twenty years ago when I first had a go. It’s so much more advanced now. No more paper slips and instead a whole heap of playlists intuitive to your vocal needs. There are the ballads and the up-tempo numbers. Best of all, our Karaoke booth even had a box of glittery accessories. Let’s just say the plastic guitar came in handy for singing along to Bohemian Rhapsody. It didn’t matter whether we could sing good or bad. We all shared the two microphones and chipped in when we could.
We learnt a little more about one another; grew a mutual appreciation for our love of certain songs and generally laughed lots. It was great to see that we could all remember the actions to certain songs and recalled various words. There were also plenty of times when we were all stumped wondered how the lyrics should be sung to the background melody. Yet when that occurred we all managed to come together and adlib. It was hilarious.
We agreed the evening was a great idea and one that we should definitely replicate.