Shared music listening synchronizes brain activity

While sharing a musical experience with a friend might not drastically alter your overall enjoyment of a song, it tends to synchronize your brain activity and emotional responses. A recent study published in the journal Cortex has found that listening to music with another person increases the moment-to-moment similarity of subjective pleasure and enhances neural alignment. These findings help explain how music acts as a powerful tool for social bonding and collective emotional experiences.

Human beings naturally use music as a social tool to connect with others. From singing lullabies to infants to gathering at large stadium concerts, music helps regulate emotions and foster a sense of group cohesion. The ability of music to align emotions and physical responses among audiences fulfills a basic human need for social connection.

Scientists recognize that both music and social interactions activate the brain’s reward centers. This shared activation suggests that the social setting in which people listen to music might alter the fundamental way the brain processes musical pleasure. The mesolimbic reward circuitry, a network in the brain responsible for feelings of intense pleasure, plays a major role in these experiences.

“We were interested in better understanding how sharing music influences both our emotions and our brain activity,” said study author Federico Curzel, a postdoctoral fellow at the University of Pavia, working with the Laboratory of Psychology of Aging and the MusiCognition lab. “Music is a powerful social tool that can promote bonding and a sense of togetherness, yet the underlying neural mechanisms of these shared experiences are still not well understood,” he explained.

To investigate this, the researchers recruited 34 pairs of close friends, totaling 68 healthy participants. The sample consisted mostly of young adult women with an average age of 21 years. Participants filled out questionnaires to gauge their sensitivity to musical reward and their general empathy traits.

The scientists asked these pairs of friends to listen to brief music clips under two distinct social conditions. In the solo condition, participants sat alone in an isolated room, completely unaware of what their friend was doing. In the joint condition, the two friends sat face-to-face across a table in the same room.

The music selection included a total of 15 different songs, each trimmed to exactly 40 seconds. The playlist included five of the participant’s own favorite songs and five of their friend’s favorite songs. It also included five pop songs selected by the researchers to match the acoustic features of the other tracks.

While listening, participants used a digital slider to continuously rate their level of pleasure on a scale from zero to 100. This allowed the researchers to capture the exact highs and lows of enjoyment as the song progressed. After each song, participants also provided an overall rating of how much they liked the track.

To monitor brain activity, the researchers used a technique called functional near-infrared spectroscopy. This non-invasive method involves placing a specialized fabric cap on the head equipped with small sensors. These sensors emit harmless light through the skull to measure changes in blood flow and oxygen levels in the brain.

“Regarding the neuroimaging technique, fNIRS allowed us to maintain a more ecological setting, in which participants could move naturally, which is a key advantage for studying social interactions,” Curzel noted. Because the technique has lower spatial resolution than other imaging methods, the team developed a tool to estimate precise anatomical coordinates from a short video of the participant’s head. They hope to release an open-source version of this tool to help improve replicability in future studies.

By monitoring both friends at the exact same time, the researchers could measure interpersonal neural synchrony. This concept refers to the way two different brains align their activity patterns when experiencing the same event or environment. High synchrony indicates that the two brains are responding to the stimulus in a highly similar, connected manner.

Curzel pointed out that past research on shared music has yielded mixed results, making this face-to-face study particularly revealing. “We were surprised to find that shared listening increased pleasure specifically for the friend’s favorite songs, rather than in a general way,” he said. Merely having a friend present did not drastically increase overall pleasure ratings across all types of music.

More notably, the researchers found that sharing the listening experience increased what they called pleasure similarity within the pair. This means that as the song played, the two friends experienced rises and falls in their enjoyment at the exact same moments.

“Our findings suggest that when we share music with a friend, we don’t just listen together, we actually experience it more similarly,” Curzel explained. Even though the friends could not see each other’s rating sliders during the joint condition, “without talking or exchanging explicit feedbacks, their feelings of pleasure became aligned over time.”

Brain activity data revealed that listening to highly pleasurable music naturally boosted oxygen levels in the prefrontal cortex. An increase in oxygen indicates that a brain region is drawing more blood flow and working harder to process rewards.

This brain activation was specifically stronger when friends listened together rather than alone. The shared social setting appeared to amplify the brain’s biological response, making the physiological experience of musical pleasure more intense.

The researchers also discovered that brain synchronization between the two friends was noticeably higher in the joint listening condition. This phenomenon occurs when two separate brains begin to display similar patterns of activity at the exact same time.

“The more closely their pleasure responses matched moment by moment, the more their brain activity synchronized, but only when they were physically together,” Curzel said. Because this heightened synchrony primarily occurred in the joint condition, it suggests that the shared social experience drives the alignment. “In other words, we scientifically proved that music can bring people ‘onto the same wavelength’, both emotionally and neurally.”

While these findings offer a detailed look at social music listening, individual differences play a large role. “It is important to remember that findings from scientific studies reflect overall effects observed at the group level,” Curzel advised. “In this study, not everyone experienced shared music in the same way: some participants felt more ‘in sync’ and also reported greater enjoyment, while others did not.”

These variations tend to depend on context, the relationship between the individuals, and specific personality traits. Another potential misinterpretation is assuming that the presence of any person will naturally enhance brain synchronization. Since this study specifically used pairs of close friends, the results might look very different if the experiment involved complete strangers.

The research team is currently analyzing movement synchrony during the shared listening sessions, as well as how well participants remembered the songs the following day. “In the longer term, I would like to extend this experimental approach to clinical and relational contexts, such as music therapy,” Curzel said. This could help provide objective markers of emotional attunement between a patient and therapist.

He also expressed interest in investigating how neurochemical processes, such as oxytocin and serotonin, relate to shared experiences and neural synchrony. This work was supported by a grant from the French National Research Agency awarded to Laura Ferreri, who co-directs the MusiCognition Laboratory at the University of Pavia with Carlotta Lega.

The study, “Joint music listening enhances interpersonal affective and neural synchrony,” was authored by Federico Curzel, Barbara Tillmann, Arnaud Fournel, Giacomo Novembre, and Laura Ferreri.