Runners try to hack their own pace by crafting playlists of songs with a specific number of beats per minute, hoping the tempo will coax their gait to a matching speed. High school marching bands employ crisp brass fanfares to help lock their steps into time with one another. People with Parkinson’s disease, who suffer from a faltering, unsteady gait, can lock into a smoother, more regular gait when prompted with highly rhythmic music. Even when people are lying in a brain scanner, doing nothing, music that has a beat activates the motor areas of the brain. The impulse to move is irresistible; whether people are lying in a giant clinical tube or attempting to conform to Carnegie Hall’s expectation that they remain seated, an imagined sense of movement materializes. This phantom, imagined movement constitutes an important aspect of music’s transportive potency.
Researcher Laura Cirelli suspected that some of music’s social benefits might come from its capacity to sync people with one another in time. She devised a setup in which she could manipulate whether or not a 14-month-old moved in synchrony with the experimenter, and subsequently test how helpful the child was when the experimenter appeared to run into trouble. During the first part of the study, the toddler is strapped to the front of a research assistant. Staring out of the carrier at the experimenter, who is bouncing to a beat, the toddler is either bounced in time or out of time with the experimenter’s up and downs.
In the next part of the study, the toddler stands in the room while the experimenter conducts a task, such as hanging dishrags onto a clothesline using a set of wooden pins. At some point, the experimenter drops a clothespin and remains standing, with one arm on the clothesline, stretching the other toward the pin on the floor, wiggling her fingers and looking distressed. After 10 seconds, she starts looking back and forth from the toddler to the clothespin. After 10 more seconds, she starts saying, “My clothespin!”
The researchers measured whether the toddler ran to help the experimenter, and how quickly, as an index of helpfulness and prosocial behavior. They found that toddlers who had been bounced in time with the experimenter were more helpful when she ran into a problem—they chose to pick up the clothespin and hand it to her more often and more quickly than toddlers who had been bounced out of time.
This seems like an exceptional finding. What could we want more of in our society than people helping each other? And here is a study showing that helpfulness can be boosted in toddlers not with a six-month intervention or parental training program, but simply by bouncing together for a few minutes. It would strain belief, except that there is a body of evidence from multiple experiments with different designs showing the same thing.
One way to understand these findings is to presume that music takes on the people and contexts that surround it. When kids interact musically, the sound saturates itself with the partner’s identity. The interaction allows the partner a deeper imprint, leaving the child feeling a stronger affiliation. There’s a straight line between the way that song seems to carry a caregiver’s touch across physical distance and the way musical interactions build rapport. The social bonding theory argues that music acquired the capacity to vividly carry extramusical associations because it promoted interpersonal bonding that conferred an evolutionary advantage. A mother whose hands were occupied could use song to convey her presence in a way that felt vivid and convincing to an infant. It’s a kind of daydream, where the music conjures up virtually a sense of parental embrace that isn’t actually happening. This transportive capacity arose in the context of caregiving, but ended up making it possible not just for music to sound like a mother’s hug, but also for it to sound like a sunny afternoon, a menacing assembly of forces, or anything else.
Researchers have found that when given the choice between two kids they’ve never met before, 4- and 5-year-olds choose to be friends with whichever one researchers tell them shares their favorite song. Even 5-month-olds hear social affiliation in music. In another study, babies were presented with the same song repeatedly in one of several conditions: either sung at home by a parent, produced by a toy, or sung by a “friendly but unfamiliar” adult first in person, and then over video calls. When tested much later (an average of eight months later), babies who had been exposed to the song by a toy or a socially unrelated adult didn’t prefer it over a new melody. Babies who had heard the song at home from a parent, however, did prefer it, and the more parents had sung it to them back when they were even tinier, the more they preferred it. Songs carry the traces of the contexts in which they’ve been encountered. A song lovingly uttered by a parent carries the halo of that interaction even when babies haven’t heard it for eight intervening months.
People list their favorite bands at the top of their dating profiles, as if broadcasting these preferences is enough to lure the most compatible matches. From infancy through adulthood, we experience music as a proxy for the people and contexts within which we previously encountered it; this sometimes led to the presumption of interpersonal connection where none might exist. According to this view of evolutionary history, music arose to transmit vivid imaginings of other people because that ability advanced social bonds that were advantageous. But along with that came the capacity to transmit a host of other vivid imaginings, not just of people, but also of places, things, and experiences. Paradoxically, the take here is that music can send us into vivid interior worlds precisely because they connect us to the people around us. What feels solipsistic actually contains the seeds of deeper bonding.
