How We Bond Through Music

Highly rhythmic music can influence movement by matching tempo to gait, helping marching bands lock steps, and enabling people with Parkinson’s disease to adopt smoother, more regular walking patterns. Beat-based music activates motor areas of the brain even when people are lying in a scanner and not moving. The sense of movement can arise from an irresistible impulse to move, producing phantom imagined movement that contributes to music’s transportive power. Social benefits may come from synchronizing individuals in time. A study with a 14-month-old tested whether moving in synchrony with an experimenter affected how helpful the child was when the experimenter appeared to encounter trouble, using timed bouncing and a task involving dropped clothespins.

"Runners try to hack their own pace by crafting playlists of songs with a specific number of beats per minute, hoping the tempo will coax their gait to a matching speed. High school marching bands employ crisp brass fanfares to help lock their steps into time with one another. People with Parkinson's disease, who suffer from a faltering, unsteady gait, can lock into a smoother, more regular gait when prompted with highly rhythmic music."

"Even when people are lying in a brain scanner, doing nothing, music that has a beat activates the motor areas of the brain. The impulse to move is irresistible; whether people are lying in a giant clinical tube or attempting to conform to Carnegie Hall's expectation that they remain seated, an imagined sense of movement materializes. This phantom, imagined movement constitutes an important aspect of music's transportive potency."

"Researcher Laura Cirelli suspected that some of music's social benefits might come from its capacity to sync people with one another in time. She devised a setup in which she could manipulate whether or not a 14-month-old moved in synchrony with the experimenter, and subsequently test how helpful the child was when the experimenter appeared to run into trouble."

"During the first part of the study, the toddler is strapped to the front of a research assistant. Staring out of the carrier at the experimenter, who is bouncing to a beat, the toddler is either bounced in time or out of time with the experimenter's up and downs. In the next part of the study, the toddler stands in the room while the experimenter conducts a task, such as hanging dishrags onto a clothesline using a set of wooden pins."

Read at Psychology Today