News
Together Through The Music
Music has the capacity of connecting the musician and its audience emotionally and behaviourally. A new study published in NeuroImage has uncovered a connection right down at the neural level.
Yingying Hou at East China Normal University and his team observed “inter-brain coherence” (IBC), a synchronisation in brain activity.
The team used a technique called near-infrared spectroscopy to monitor the brain activity of a professional violinist while he was videoed playing a series of 12 brief, classical pieces. They then used the same technique (which involves shining beams of light through the skull, to monitor changes in blood flow) on 16 women while they watched the video, and listened to all of these pieces. Because gender differences in inter-brain synchronisation have previously been observed, only women were recruited as listeners.
The data revealed inter-brain coherence between each of the listeners and the musician, for all of the violin pieces.
The team also found that more popular pieces were marked by stronger inter-brain coherence in the left temporal cortex between the audience as a whole and the performer.
Yingying Hou at East China Normal University and his team observed “inter-brain coherence” (IBC), a synchronisation in brain activity.
The team used a technique called near-infrared spectroscopy to monitor the brain activity of a professional violinist while he was videoed playing a series of 12 brief, classical pieces. They then used the same technique (which involves shining beams of light through the skull, to monitor changes in blood flow) on 16 women while they watched the video, and listened to all of these pieces. Because gender differences in inter-brain synchronisation have previously been observed, only women were recruited as listeners.
The data revealed inter-brain coherence between each of the listeners and the musician, for all of the violin pieces.
The team also found that more popular pieces were marked by stronger inter-brain coherence in the left temporal cortex between the audience as a whole and the performer.