Although music has been associated with increased pro-social behavior, the underlying mechanisms for music-facilitated social benefits are not known. We test the hypothesis that chord progressions promote social bonding between dyads by shared temporal alignment of frequency spectra. Two musical conditions were presented to 20 pairs of participants (equal numbers of males and females), one with either a structured chord and predictable progression and the other with an unstructured and unpredictable composition of the same notes. Functional near infrared spectroscopy signals were recorded simultaneously from both partners during the music conditions with and without gazing at a live partner’s face. The right angular gyrus, right somatosensory association cortex and bilateral dorsal lateral prefrontal cortex increased activation during live face gaze combined with the structured chord progression condition. Further, subjective ratings of subjective connectedness were associated with both activity in right superior and middle temporal gyri during face gaze and the right angular gyrus during chord progressions. These findings link live face-to-face gaze while listening to structured chord progressions to neural systems that are responsive to predictive alignment of co-occurring acoustic spectra and perceptions of social connectedness. Significance Statement Music is universally appreciated as a promoter of social bonding and a candidate for therapeutics for social disconnection syndromes. However, a theoretical framework and the necessary link between neural correlates of social behavior and specific features of music are not established. We test the hypothesis that listening to consonant chord progressions during live face gaze relative to corresponding scrambled notes promotes social bonding and activates social neural systems. Subjective ratings of social connectedness, neural activity observed in social systems, and cross-brain neural synchrony support the hypothesis that musical chord progressions are a salient musical feature that upregulates social neural systems. These findings advance an evidence-based framework for use of musical chord progressions to treat symptoms of social disconnection and isolation.
Watts et al. (Thu,) studied this question.