Runners try to break their pace by making a playlist of songs with a certain number of beats per minute, and hope that the pace will make them run at a suitable pace. High school marching bands use brass bands to lock their steps in time with each other. People with Parkinson’s disease who suffer from an unsteady and unsteady gait can develop a smoother and more regular gait when prompted by loud, rhythmic music. Even when people to lie in a brain scan, doing nothing, music that has a beat activates the motor areas of the brain. The impulse to move is irresistible; whether people sleep in a giant clinical tube or try to match there is an imagined sense of movement in anticipation of Carnegie Hall where they are seated. This imaginal and imagined movement constitutes an important aspect of music’s communicative potential.
Researcher Laura Cirelli hypothesized that some of the social benefits of music may come from its ability to synchronize people with each other in time. He devised a setup in which he could control whether a 14-month-old child moved in sync with the experimenter, and then test how helpful the child was when the experimenter encountered a problem. In the first part of the study, the infant is tied to a research assistant. Looking from the carrier to the experimenter, who is striking, the infant is absorbed either in time or out of time with the ups and downs of the experimenter.
In the next part of the study, the infant stands in a room while the experimenter performs a task such as hanging dishes on a clothesline using a set of wooden pegs. At some point, the experimenter drops the clothesline and stands, one hand on the clothesline, the other reaching for a pin on the floor, and wiggles her fingers, looking agitated. After 10 seconds, she starts looking back and forth from the baby. After another 10 seconds, she starts saying, “My jacket!”
The researchers measured whether the infant ran to help the experimenter and how fast as an indicator of helpfulness and social behavior. They found that infants who were absorbed in time with the experimenter were more helpful when faced with a problem that she encountered—they were more likely to pick up a garment and hand it to her than infants who were out of time.
This seems like an exceptional find. What would we like more in our society, people helping each other? And here’s a study showing that helping young children can be boosted not by a six-month intervention or a parent training program, but by just a few minutes of clapping. This beggars belief, except that there is a body of evidence from multiple experiments with different designs that show the same thing.
One way to understand these findings is to assume that music surrounds people and their contexts. When children communicate musically, the sound is saturated with the partner’s voice personality. The relationship allows the partner to have a deeper influence and gives the child a stronger sense of belonging. There is a fine line between the way this song seems to convey the touch of a caregiver over physical distance and the way music creates relationships. social link the theory suggests that music gained the ability to clearly convey non-musical associations because it facilitated interpersonal communication, which provided an evolutionary advantage. A mother with busy hands could express her presence through song in a way that felt clear and convincing to the infant. It’s a kind of fantasy where the music actually creates a sense of a parental hug that doesn’t actually happen. This transport capacity was created in its context carebut in the end it allowed the music to sound not just like a mother’s embrace, but like a sunny afternoon, a threatening gathering of forces, or something else.
The researchers found that when given a choice of two children they had never met before, 4- and 5-year-olds became friends with whom the researchers said they shared their favorite song. Even 5-month-olds can hear social affiliation in music. In another study, children were repeatedly presented with a song in one of several conditions: either sung at home by a parent, a manufactured toy, or sung by a “friendly but unfamiliar” adult, first in person and then via video call. When tested much later (after an average of eight months), children who had been exposed to the song by a toy or a socially connected adult did not prefer it over the new tune. Children who heard this song at home from their parents preferred the song, and the more parents sang it to them when they were even younger, the more they preferred it. Songs bear traces of the contexts in which they were encountered. A song sung lovingly by a parent, even when the children haven’t heard it in the intervening eight months, carries the halo of that communication.
People list their favorite bands above them dating profiles, as if clicking on these preferences is enough to attract the most relevant matches. From childhood to adulthood, we experience music as a proxy for the people and contexts we have previously encountered; this sometimes led to the assumption of an interpersonal connection where none existed. According to this view of evolutionary history, music evolved to convey the vivid imagination of other people because this ability fostered social connections that were beneficial. But at the same time, the ability to convey a number of other vivid images, not only of people, but also of places, objects and experiences appeared. It’s amazing how music can send us to a brighter inner world because it connects us with the people around us. What feels solipsistic actually contains the seeds of a deeper connection.
