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Music syncs strangers in milliseconds
Syncing from infancy
People are always syncing up with each other. A nine-month-old listening to music syncs to the sounds and rhythms of its culture's music, and physiologically to whoever is nearby.
At a concert or a sporting event, heart rates sync up and brains synchronize. One account of collective consciousness holds that everyone in the crowd is sharing brain patterns and awareness.
A shortcut to bonding
People who have been to a Taylor Swift show are instantly bonded, almost united in a moral cause or an identity. Getting a species to cooperate in groups is hard work, and it is vulnerable to exploitation. Awe is one of the fastest pathways through: dancing together, chanting together, and cheering together at sporting events, what Emile Durkheim called collective effervescence.
How do singers' heart rates end up synced?
In a 2013 study in Frontiers in Psychology, Bjorn Vickhoff and colleagues in Sweden measured the heart rates of choir singers. When the singers sang in unison to slow, structured pieces, their heart rate variability fell into the same pattern. The pattern followed the breathing demands of the phrases. Choral phrasing forces everyone to inhale and exhale at the same moments, and heart rate follows breathing.
How did Durkheim come to his idea of effervescence?
Emile Durkheim published The Elementary Forms of Religious Life in 1912, drawing on ethnographic accounts of Aboriginal Australian ceremonies. He observed that gatherings with chanting and dance produced a heightened shared energy that made the group feel like a single body. He argued that this energy was the root of religion and of the sense of the sacred. The term collective effervescence comes from that book.
Do babies really move to music?
In a 2010 study in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, Marcel Zentner and Tuomas Eerola played infants between five months and two years old rhythmic music and speech. The babies moved more rhythmically to the music than to the speech. Their movements also tended to line up with the beat. Beat perception appears to be present before babies can walk or talk.
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