Jul 11, 2024
While listening to music can be done alone, it’s never a solitary activity. Just consider how certain songs make you think of a friend, remember a lover, or feel deep kinship with an artist. Musical notes weave together intricate connective webs—even when they’re played for an audience of one.
But why, exactly, does music bond us? How do different sounds engage our sense of community and connection? And how can we use them to combat the global loneliness crisis? Let’s explore these questions, together.
Untangling music’s invisible ties
The fact that humans have been making music for millennia (the oldest instrument is thought to be around 40,000-60,000 years old) shows that doing so carried an evolutionary advantage. Historians theorized that it helped with mate selection, building social cohesion, and fostering feelings of belonging. Before the days of Facebook and online dating, music was the original community builder.
Advancements in neuroscience equipment have allowed us to put these theories to the test by monitoring changes in the brain as people listen to music in real time. And indeed, music seems to “light up” neural regions associated with social bonding. Here’s a peek at what’s happening underneath the hood once you press play:
1. Your body fills with the love hormone
One way that music spurs connections is by increasing levels of oxytocin, the “love hormone” that makes us feel closer to others, explains Concetta Tomaino, DA, the Executive Director of The Institute for Music & Neurologic Function and the Music Therapy Advisor at Spiritune.
While physical touch is a well-known oxytocin activator, research shows that songs—whether fast-tempo or slow-tempo—can also cause our bodies to release the hormone. Elevated oxytocin levels have been linked to increased trust, generosity, and ability to infer the mental state of others, as well as decreases in stress and anxiety.
2. Your empathy is engaged
Empathy—or our ability to relate to others, even if we don’t share their experiences—also seems to have musical roots. One study of schoolchildren found that those who took music classes for an hour a week had significantly improved empathy scores compared to their peers who didn’t take music by the end of the academic year.
As for why making or listening to music would engage empathy, researchers suspect that it could be because of the way it allows us to dip into the emotion of a song—be it excited, joyful, or melancholy—without changing our lived experience. “Indeed, empathy is putting oneself in other people’s shoes and feeling what one thinks others are feeling, but maintaining the distinction between self and others, while listening to music involves a similar process of viewing from a distance as in empathy,” write psychologists in a 2021 Frontiers in Psychology paper.
3. Awe expands your perspective
Think to the last time you got goosebumps, felt chills, or shed a tear in the face of something immensely beautiful or inspiring: You were experiencing awe, another emotion that’s routinely tied to music.
Awe is what we feel when we encounter something that is vast (be it an endless view or a song that transcends space and time) and makes us feel small by comparison. Psychology researchers are fascinated by this emotion because of the unique way that it seems to reduce our sense of self-focus and expand our perspective. In turn, awe is associated with generosity, humility, and other cornerstones of healthy relationships.
4. You sync up with those around you
Researchers around the world are now equipping musicians and concertgoers with eyesight trackers and portable EEGs in order to study the unique ways that shared musical experiences bring us together.
It seems that when we are listening to music with others, our heart rates, breathing patterns, and movements tend to synchronize—especially during emotionally powerful crescendos. This musical entrainment might blur our sense of self vs. other and change the way we interact with our fellow concergoers. It’s why you might feel more connected to those around you during a concert than you would during, say, a museum trip or a sports match.
“Shared musical experiences bond us with each other even if we don't know each other,” explains Tomaino. “It can build that sense of community.”
What we gain when we share music
Tomaino has witnessed the power of music to bring people together firsthand. She tells the story of a music therapy support group that she started for veterans with PTSD around 10 years ago. The vets didn’t know each other going into the group, and she remembers that they were all very guarded at first.
It wasn’t until engaging with the music that they started being honest with each other about their struggles. “They were able to open up; they bonded with each other so much… It was this vulnerable exploration through music that allowed them to feel safe,” Tomaino recalls. To this day, those in the class stay connected through sound—they make music together, attend concerts as a group, and write songs for each other when someone is going through a tough time.
Tomaino has also seen music help break down walls in her work with dementia patients. “When they share familiar music, there's a sense of knowing and a sense of awareness that's still available to them,” she says. “It’s in those shared moments that they’re able to relax, feel safe, and connect.”
These stories show how music can be used not only to forge fast friendships at concerts but to actively improve mental and cognitive health in the long run.
How to tackle loneliness using music
In the midst of a loneliness epidemic compounded by COVID-19, Tomaino has observed that doctors are increasingly writing “music prescriptions” for patients who feel isolated, recommending they sing in the choir, join a band, or go to concerts as preventative mental health measures.
If you, too, are feeling lonely, getting involved in your local musical community might help. However, you don’t necessarily need to shell out for concert tickets or learn a new instrument to increase your oxytocin levels, decrease your stress, and feel more connected: you can just pop on your headphones or turn up your speaker.
Using Spiritune can help guide your sonic journey towards community. “Lonely” is one of the starting states on the app, and if you choose it, you’ll be served up compositions that utilize neuroscience and music therapy principles to carry you out of this headspace.
“The way we designed the parameters for the music in Spiritune has to do with training different emotional levels—be it the tempo, the pace of the music, or the envelope of sound,” explains Tomaino. She’s hopeful that someday soon, Spiritune will be recognized as a mental health therapy in clinical settings, and doctors will be able to prescribe it to patients as a (side-effect free) medicine that’s covered by insurance.
Until then, Spiritune is proud to be provided in clinical settings through impactful clinical partners like Galileo Health, or through military family support groups like Blue Star Families, or through many employers as a mental health resource. Alternatively, the low-cost tool is yours to use any time you’re craving the sense of peace, relaxation, and awe that music is so uniquely positioned to deliver. Just download Spiritune on the App Store or Google Play.
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