Engraving of Scotswomen singing while waulking cloth, c. 1770. Work songs, musical pieces designed to be performed or sung while working, have been widely documented across various cultures and in different historical periods. For instance, people in different nations have been known to sometimes sing together while rowing, sailing, harvesting crops or building structures. Researchers at Central European University in Austria recently carried out a study aimed at exploring the effects of work songs on team coordination. Their paper, published in Proceedings of the Royal Society B , offers evidence that traditional work songs can stabilize the collective timing of a team, preventing individual members from unintentionally speeding up. "The project grew out of our previous work on a phenomenon we call joint rushing : when people perform rhythmic actions together, they often unintentionally speed up," Thomas Wolf, first author of the paper, told Phys.org.…