New research provides evidence that listening to familiar and predictable musical chord progressions while making eye contact with another person increases activity in parts of the brain associated with social interaction. This combination of music and eye contact also tends to make people feel more socially connected to each other. These findings were recently published in The Journal of Neuroscience.
The authors conducted this study to investigate the exact brain mechanisms that explain why music brings people together. While many people experience a sense of bonding through music, the biological processes behind this feeling remain mostly unmapped. A major motivation was to explore how specific musical elements could eventually be used as medical therapies for conditions related to social isolation.
“The question of how and why listening to music enhances social behavior has a long history in neuroscience,” said study author Joy Hirsch, the Elizabeth Mears and House Jameson professor of psychiatry, comparative medicine and neuroscience at the Yale School of Medicine. Hirsch, who also directs the Brain Function Laboratory and is affiliated with the Wu Tsai Institute at Yale University, added that a primary reason to explore this topic is the potential for developing music therapies to treat clinical conditions with social symptoms.
Study author AZA Stephen Allsop, an assistant professor of psychiatry at Yale University and an affiliate assistant professor at Howard University, shared a personal motivation for the work. “I am a life-long musician and a professional independent artist as well as a physician-scientist,” Allsop explained. “I’ve always been obsessed with understanding how sounds can activate neural circuits in a way that can facilitate social connection and healing.”
Allsop also serves as the director of the Center for Collective Healing and the medical director of the Rapid Evaluation, Stabilization, and Treatment Center.
“This research allowed me to directly test an observation I made as a musician about how chord progressions shape the way people respond to music, especially in social settings like a music concert or church,” Allsop continued. “It’s very satisfying to begin approaching these questions that I’ve had as a musician through scientifically validated tools and then ask how I can use this information to help my patients.”
Another reason this study is happening now is because of new brain scanning tools. In the past, brain scans required a person to lie perfectly still inside a large, loud machine, which made natural social interactions impossible.
“Prior to this paradigm shift functional imaging was primarily performed in an MRI scanner without the possibility of live social interaction,” Hirsch noted. “The new dual brain technology plus advances in multimodal approaches including neural and synchronized behavioral variables provides a quantum leap in opportunity to study questions such as how music interacts with neural systems that enhance social behavior.”
To conduct the experiment, the scientists recruited 40 healthy adults, consisting of 20 men, 18 women, and two nonbinary individuals. The participants had an average age of about 27 years. These individuals were paired up into 20 two-person groups. The pairs sat across a table from each other, separated by a specially designed piece of glass that could instantly switch between transparent and opaque.
The researchers recorded the participants’ brain activity using a technique called functional near-infrared spectroscopy. This method uses special caps fitted with small sensors that shine safe, low-level light through the scalp to measure changes in blood oxygen levels. Because active brain regions consume more oxygen, this technology allows scientists to map brain activity while participants sit up and interact normally.
During the experiment, the participants listened to two different types of musical tracks. One track featured a highly predictable and harmonious chord progression that is very common in Western popular music. The other track used the exact same notes and instruments, but the timing and structure of the piano and bass were completely scrambled, making the melody unpredictable. Both tracks featured the same steady drumbeat.
As the participants listened to the music, the glass between them toggled back and forth. Sometimes the glass was transparent, allowing the pair to make natural eye contact. Other times, the glass was frosted, blocking their view of one another. After each round of listening, the participants used a digital dial to rate how socially connected they felt to their partner on a scale from zero to five.
The scientists found that feelings of social connection peaked when participants looked at each other while listening to the structured, predictable chord progressions. “There are several take-home messages,” Hirsch explained. “Music with predictable chord progressions (unlike typical jazz, for example) was found to be most effective in increasing feelings of social connectedness.”
The brain scans revealed that specific regions lit up during this exact combination of eye contact and predictable music. The right angular gyrus, a brain area involved in processing social information and understanding events, showed increased activity. The researchers also saw heightened activity in the somatosensory association cortex, a region usually linked to physical touch and sensation, as well as in the prefrontal cortex, which handles complex planning and social behavior.
“We believe that these findings are the first to break through conventional obstacles that have traditionally prevented rigorous investigation of how live social effects are modulated by music and the underlying neural systems that mediate the social perceptions,” Hirsch said. “There are specific areas of the brain that are responsive to the combination of live faces and structured chord progressions. There are also specific areas of the brain that are associated with subjective feelings of social connectedness that are elicited by both mutual live face gaze and predictable chord progressions.”
In addition to measuring individual brain activity, the researchers examined how the two participants’ brains synced up with each other. They observed that the brain waves of the two partners began to mirror each other during the face-to-face, structured music condition. This brain synchronization suggests that the pairs were experiencing a shared state of social cooperation and emotional alignment.
The authors noted a few unexpected elements in their data. “The main finding: predictable chord progressions enhance social neural systems and perceptions of social connections between people, is surprising because without this finding we had no basis for such a prediction,” Hirsch said. “These findings have led us to propose a novel hypothesis that the predictability of the music enhances natural social interactive behaviors that also predict responses of another person.”
Hirsch added that this shared predictive behavior might be a core function of human bonding. “The idea is that predictable music may upregulate this unique social mechanism,” she explained. “This idea, of course, requires further testing.”
Allsop also highlighted an unexpected detail regarding the brain regions involved. “I was surprised by the clear involvement of the somatosensory cortex in music-based social connection,” Allsop said. “This suggests that our feelings of social connection are mediated by this part of the brain that is known to be important for physical sensation. It is still a mystery how features of music can activate this region as a mediator of felt social connection.”
These observations suggests that songwriters and composers might be tapping into basic human biology. “Familiar, common musical chord progressions can make us feel more connected through the activation of a neural network that is important for how we process social information and feel subjective connection,” Allsop explained. “Musicians likely intuitively arrived at these formulas for song composition because of their felt effects on neurophysiology.”
The authors noted that there are a few limitations to consider regarding future directions. Measurements of social connection are based on personal feelings, which means different people might interpret the concept of connectedness differently. Future studies will need to use multiple methods to measure these feelings, perhaps including questions about how pleasant the participants found the music.
“This study is an initial ‘proof of principle’ that music is a salient and potentially therapeutic stimulus,” Hirsch noted. “In order for the full potential of music to be applied in medical applications there needs to be a clear understanding of the neural mechanisms of action. This investigation provides a foundational starting point for more advanced quantification of the music/social brain interface.”
Hirsch also pointed out the logistical challenges of conducting this type of work. “This investigation took several years to complete due to the absence of dedicated funding,” she said. “The significance of funding for this kind of research cannot be overestimated and protection of our funding mechanisms is a high priority for future advances.”
Looking ahead, the researchers hope to apply these concepts in real-world settings to assist people with specific mental health needs. “Our next step is to understand not only how these specific features can activate the unique neural networks that we are observing, but how these features might be used in the delivery of music-based therapeutics across a number of conditions such as anxiety, depression, schizophrenia, and autism,” Allsop concluded.
“One very attractive next step for this line of research is a clinical trial to test for clinical benefits and how they might be realized,” Hirsch added.
The study, “Listening to a Consonant Chord Progression during Live Face-to-Face Gaze Enhances Neural Activity in Social Systems,” was authored by Dash A Watts, AZA Stephen Allsop, Simone Compton, Xian Zhang, J Adam Noah, and Joy Hirsch.
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