Music, from a very young age, has an enormous impact on human emotions, development, and social interactions. The more scientists learn about the way people process music, the better they can understand perception, multisensory integration, and social coordination throughout someone’s life.

Two separate studies, which were recently presented at the 25th meeting of the Cognitive Neuroscience Society, portray the many behavioral impacts of music.

The first study dissects how musical engagement influences infants’ social-emotional development, the second links the presence of performers and audience during a live concert to improved connection and greater enjoyment of music.

The Lullaby Study

A team of researchers conducted a series of tests to investigate how both mothers and babies respond to lullabies and playsongs.

The team explored how mothers adjust the way they sing to their babies depending on if they wish to be soothing or playful.

“In this experiment, 30 mother-infant pairs came into the lab,” said Laura Cirelli, a researcher in the Department of Psychology at the University of Toronto and author of the study.

“Babies would sit in a highchair and mothers would sit facing them,” she continued. “We asked mothers to repeatedly sing ‘Twinkle Twinkle’ and to alternate between singing it in a soothing way and in a playful way. We videotaped the interactions and also measured skin conductance in both the mother and baby using stickers on the infants’ feet and mothers’ finger tips. This essentially measures stress levels.”

When humans are excited or stressed, sweat glands become more active so skin conductance increases. When people are able to relax, the levels decrease, explained Cirelli.

Through the tests, the researchers discovered that when mothers sang in a playful way, their infants became more attentive and even started smiling and giggling. When mothers sang playsongs, mom and baby levels remained stable, but when mothers began to sing in a soothing way both mom and baby stress levels dropped, said Cirelli.  

“This shows us that these two song styles that mothers often use with infants have distinct and functionally relevant effects on mother and baby,” said Cirelli. “Lullabies are soothing for both mother and infant, and maternal song may be an important way to regulate mother-infant emotional responses.”

This study reinforces the concept that music has a positive impact on social development and engagement.

In a past study, in which Cirelli had 14-month-olds bouncing synchronously with unfamiliar adults, she proved that when people move together in synchrony, they are more likely to feel socially connected and cooperate with one another.

“Music is a tool that we can use to bring people together, and this starts in infancy,” Cirelli said in a statement.

Live Music Study

A team of researchers recently conducted a study at McMaster University’s LIVElab to help demonstrate, in-part, why people will still pay hundreds of dollars to go to a live show, even though the same music is easily streamable online.

To do so, the team evaluated how the presence of a live performer and audience affects the brain-rhythm synchronization of concert-goers.

“The study shows that our electrical brain activity synchronizes with music at a concert, and this phenomenon causes audience brains to be in sync with each other,” said Molly Henry, postdoctoral associate in the Department of Psychology at Western University in London, Ontario and co-author of the study.

At the LIVELab, the researchers had a band play for 80 people. Twenty of those people had their brain activity recorded with electroencephalography (EEG), a method used to record electrical activity of the brain.

The researchers then compared the EEG measurements to those recorded in two separate environments. The first instance had 20 people experiencing the concert on a movie screen with the same audio from the live performance. In the second environment, the team separated 20 participants into groups of two, and had the groups sit apart while they watched the performance on the movie screen.

“We manipulated the presence of the performers while keeping audience context fixed,” the authors explained in a statement.

The findings proved that the brain waves of the audience members were more synchronized with each other when the individuals watched the performance live in the same room as the performers. Additionally, members of the audience whose brain rhythms were more synchronized with the other audience members tended to feel more connected to the performers and enjoyed the concert more.

These novel findings provide insight into the more social side of music listening, Henry explained in a statement.

“The stronger an individual was engaged in the ‘social neural network’, the more they enjoyed the concert,” said Henry.
“Interestingly, the brain activity that does the synchronization is rather slow, and falls into the range of rates that corresponds to the ‘beat’ in music, and the rates at which we would move our body if we were to dance to music,” she continued.

In the study, Henry worked alongside Jessica Grahn, associate professor in the Brain and Mind Institute and the Department of Psychology at Western University.

“Rhythm in particular is mysterious: We are sensitive to the ‘beat’ – that steady, underlying pulse that we tap our foot or bob our head to – from early in life,” Grahn said in a statement. “But, even after decades of trying, ‘beat-tracking’ algorithms can’t approach anything like the automaticity and flexibility that humans show to feel the beat across different speeds, genres, and instruments.”

Henry believes that the information gathered in this study, luckily, creates more new questions than it actually answers.

“It’s not clear at this stage what the implications will be,” she said. “That depends on what future research tells us about the source of these synchronization effects.”

But researchers are excited about extending their studies regarding the continued impact of music on humans.

“We are seeing relationships between rhythm and language abilities, attention, development, hearing acuity, and even social interactions,” Grahn said in a statement. “Every sensation we have or action we make on the world unfolds over time, and we are now beginning to understand why humans are sensitive to certain types of patterns in time, but not others.”

The ability to understand these patterns could inform potential music-driven therapies for patients who suffer from neurodegenerative diseases, she continued.

Conclusion

The emotional and physical healing powers of music are immense. Since the beginning of human history, people have used songs as a means for storytelling, mending, social interactions, and more. These recent studies prove that scientists are able to quantify the behavioral impacts of music to use it as a tool.