Musical connections 

Alex Eben Meyer

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Music frames our lives, from lullabies that soothe restless babies to familiar tunes that call up long-buried memories in those with dementia. Group singing has been shown to promote social bonding, and we can hardly imagine life passages—weddings, graduations, funerals—without musical accompaniment. 

When a jazz musician and a ballroom dancer—both neuroscientists on the Yale Medical School faculty—teamed up to investigate the biological underpinnings of music’s power, they found a link between specific features of music and the neural systems in areas of the brain that help people respond to and connect with others. 

Intrigued by her research into the effects of drumming on social behavior, AZA Allsop, jazz artist and assistant professor of psychiatry, contacted Joy Hirsch, the Elizabeth Mears and House Jameson Professor of Psychiatry and professor of comparative medicine and of neuroscience (and ballroom dancer) about working together. “We wanted to uncover,” says Hirsch, “what the mechanism is that makes music influence or modulate bonding between people.”

The pair designed a series of experiments using functional near-infrared spectroscopy (fNIRS), which can capture brain images as people are engaged in social activities. They tested the responses of 20 pairs of participants (both same-gender and mixed-gender groupings) who looked into each other’s faces and listened both to consonant chord progressions—predictable sequences heard in familiar musical forms—and to the same music scrambled into dissonant patterns.

When the harmonious music played, the fNIRS showed increased activity in areas of the brain responsive to perceptions of connectedness. Those connections were weaker when the music was scrambled.

At the same time that researchers could see an objective increase in activity in those brain regions, participants reported subjective feelings of connection to their partners while hearing the harmonious music. “One of our most important findings was that perception of connectedness is directly related to the activity in these specific brain regions,” Hirsch says. 

The researchers note that understanding these underlying mechanisms is important for further development of music therapy as an evidence-based intervention to address conditions like autism, Parkinson’s disease, or social anxiety. Hirsch also notes that their line of inquiry is a “fundamental departure” from previous research into the effects of music on the brain. “All of neuroscience to this point has focused on the individual brain,” she says. “Here, we are looking at the dyadic response—how music amplifies the social system when two brains are in live interaction.”

The study, authored by Allsop, Hirsch, and researchers from other institutions, was published in The Journal of Neuroscience.