Duetting musicians sync brainwaves even when playing different notes

According to a study published by a team of psychologists, musicians playing different parts of a duet aren’t just syncing time — they synchronise brainwaves.

Johanna Sänger of Berlin’s Max Planck Institute for Human Development gathered 32 guitarists and arranged them in pairs to play Sonata in G Major by Christian Gottlieb Scheidler. Each musician was hooked up to electrodes, so Sänger and her team could monitor their brain activity the 60 times they were asked to play the composition. An earlier study from the Institute had already demonstrated that guitarists playing the exact same tune begin to share brainwave patterns. However, in this study Sänger asked the musicians to play different parts from the same piece of music. As well as playing totally different notes, one was asked to take the lead and set the tempo for the other to follow. Her hypothesis was that, if the brainwave patterns again aligned, then it would demonstrate they have an inherently important role in musicians’ “interpersonally coordinated behaviour” — or, their ability to play well as a pair. All pairs did in fact present with synchronised brain oscillations.

"When people coordinate their own actions, small networks between brain regions are formed," said Sänger. "But we also observed similar network properties between the brains of the individual players, especially when mutual coordination is very important; for example at the joint onset of a piece of music."

The synchronisation is known as “phase locking”, and took place largely where the frontal and central electrodes were placed (the frontal lobe is responsible for retaining long term memory, aligning emotion memory with social norms and predicting an action’s consequences).

The results prove, says the paper, that synchronisation of brain patterns plays “a functional role in music performance”, but also “that brain mechanisms indexed by phase locking, phase coherence, and structural properties of within-brain and hyperbrain networks support interpersonal action coordination”.

Sänger also found that the “leader’s” brainwaves were stronger and began before the music did, demonstrating their “decision to begin playing at a certain moment in time” as represented by well-coordinated frontal lobe activity.