Covid-19 Crisis and Opportunity

Measuring the spiritual dimension of music

Music is deeply embedded in Christianity and other religious traditions. There’s a strong sense that music has a special connection to spiritual realities, but this can be difficult to prove. While musicology has expanded beyond notes and harmonic structures to encompass a more anthropological approach, even this broader view of how music works can overlook the spiritual.

The crisis and opportunity of Covid-19

The Covid-19 Pandemic was a crisis for worship music as in-person worship was limited for months. In Scotland and much of the world, church services were completely shut down. Live music in sacred spaces was replaced by streaming online services. The shift to online services allowed people to more readily experience different kinds of worship music, as well as participate in musical worship in a way that was separate from the communal experience of church. This period of shut down presents an opportunity for research, as parishioners, clergy, and church musicians can be surveyed about the effects of a lack of live, in-person worship.

Despite the difficulty and tragedy of the pandemic, it offers a chance to collect empirical observations about how music types and musical experiences affect spirituality. The research expects to find detrimental effects related the shutdown, but is designed to assist in hypothesis generation by gathering data and looking for trends. To take the survey, click here.