Sharing a musical experience with a friend may not dramatically change your overall enjoyment of the song, but it does tend to synchronize your brain activity and emotional responses. A recent study published in the journal Cortex found that listening to music with others increases moment-to-moment similarity in subjective pleasure and enhances neural regulation. These findings help explain how music acts as a powerful tool for social bonding and collective emotional experiences.
Humans naturally use music as a social tool to connect with others. From singing lullabies to young children to gathering for large stadium concerts, music helps regulate emotions and fosters a sense of group togetherness. Music’s ability to modulate emotional and physical responses among its audience satisfies a basic human need for social connection.
Scientists have recognized that both music and social interaction activate the brain’s reward centers. This common activation suggests that the social environment in which people listen to music may fundamentally change the way the brain processes musical pleasure. The mesolimbic reward circuit, a network in the brain responsible for intense pleasure, plays a key role in these experiences.
“We were interested in better understanding how sharing music affects both our emotions and brain activity,” said study author Federico Kurzel, a postdoctoral researcher at the University of Pavia, collaborating with the Psychology of Aging Laboratory and the Music Cognition Laboratory. “Music is a powerful social tool that can promote bonding and togetherness, but the neural mechanisms underlying these shared experiences are still poorly understood,” he explained.
To investigate this, researchers recruited 34 pairs of close friends, a total of 68 healthy participants. The sample consisted primarily of young adult women with an average age of 21 years. Participants filled out a questionnaire measuring their sensitivity to musical rewards and general empathic traits.
The scientists had these pairs of friends listen to short music clips under two different social situations. In the solo condition, participants sat alone in an isolated room and had no idea what their friends were doing. In a communal situation, two friends sat across a table from each other 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 participants’ own favorite songs and five of their friends’ favorite songs. Also included were five pop songs selected by the researchers to match the sonic characteristics of the other tracks.
While listening, participants continuously rated their level of enjoyment using a digital slider on a scale of 0 to 100. This allowed the researchers to accurately gauge the highs and lows of enjoyment as the song progressed. After each song, participants also provided an overall rating of how much they liked the song.
To monitor brain activity, the researchers used a technique called functional near-infrared spectroscopy. This non-invasive method requires a special cloth cap equipped with a small sensor to be placed over the head. These sensors emit harmless light through the skull and measure changes in blood flow and oxygen levels in the brain.
“In terms of neuroimaging techniques, fNIRS allowed us to maintain a more ecological environment in which participants could move naturally, which is an important advantage when studying social interactions,” Curzel said. Because this technique has lower spatial resolution than other imaging methods, the research team developed a tool to estimate precise anatomical coordinates from short videos of participants’ heads. They hope to release an open source version of this tool to help improve reproducibility in future studies.
By monitoring both friends simultaneously, the researchers were able to measure interpersonal neural synchrony. This concept refers to the way two different brains coordinate their activity patterns when experiencing the same event or environment. High synchrony indicates that the two brains are responding to stimuli in very similar and related ways.
Kurzel noted that past research on music sharing has yielded mixed results, and this in-person study is particularly revealing. “We were surprised to find that shared listening increases our joy, not in a general way, but specifically for our friends’ favorite songs,” he said. Simply having friends does not significantly improve ratings of overall enjoyment of all types of music.
Even more remarkable, the researchers found that sharing a listening experience increased something called pleasantness similarity within the pair. This means that as the song played, the two friends experienced ebbs and flows of enjoyment at the exact same moment.
“Our findings suggest that when we share music with friends, we’re not just listening together; we’re actually experiencing the music in the same way,” Kurzel explained. During the joint condition, the friends could not see each other’s rating sliders, but “over time, without speaking or exchanging explicit feedback, their feelings of pleasure became congruent.”
Brain activity data reveals that listening to highly enjoyable music naturally increases oxygen levels in the prefrontal cortex. Increased oxygen indicates brain regions are drawing more blood flow and working harder to process rewards.
This brain activation was especially strong when a friend listened together rather than when listening alone. Sharing a social environment appears to amplify the brain’s biological responses, making the physiological experience of musical pleasure more intense.
The researchers also found that brain synchrony between the two friends was significantly higher under collaborative listening conditions. This phenomenon occurs when two separate brains begin to exhibit similar activity patterns at exactly the same time.
“The more their hedonic responses match from moment to moment, the more synchronized their brain activity will be, but only when they are physically together,” Kurzel said. This high synchrony occurred primarily in the joint condition, suggesting that shared social experience facilitates coordination. “In other words, we have scientifically proven that music can get people on the ‘same wavelength’ emotionally and neurologically.”
Although these findings provide a detailed examination of social music listening, individual differences play a large role. “It is important to remember that the results of scientific studies reflect the overall effects observed at the group level,” Kurzel advised. “Not everyone in this study experienced the shared music in the same way. Some participants reported feeling more ‘in sync’ and having more fun, while others did not.”
These variations tend to depend on the situation, relationships between individuals, and specific personality traits. Another potential misconception is assuming that human presence naturally enhances brain synchronization. This study specifically used pairs of close friends, so the results could be very different if complete strangers participated in the experiment.
The research team is currently analyzing the synchrony of movements during shared listening sessions and how well participants remember the songs the next day. “Long term, we hope to extend this experimental approach to clinical and interpersonal contexts, such as music therapy,” Kurzel said. This may help provide an objective indicator of emotional attunement between patient and therapist.
He also expressed an interest in investigating how neurochemical processes such as oxytocin and serotonin are related to shared experience and neural synchrony. This research was supported by a grant from the French National Research Agency awarded to Laura Ferreri, who co-directs the Music Recognition Laboratory at the University of Pavia with Carlotta Rega.
The study, “Collaborative music listening increases interpersonal affect and neural synchrony,” was authored by Federico Kurzel, Barbara Tillman, Arnaud Fournel, Giacomo Novembre, and Laura Ferreri.
