Annals of the New York Academy of Sciences

Musical expertise is often associated with heightened perceptual sensitivity to external sensory stimuli, yet its relationship with internal bodily awareness (interoception) remains elusive. This study examined whether interoceptive ability relates differentially to varying levels of singing expertise and explored if interoception could predispose individuals to musical skills. Professional singers, amateur singers, and non-singers completed a heartbeat discrimination task (interoceptive accuracy; IAcc), self-reported interoceptive sensibility assessment, and comprehensive musical competence measures. Results demonstrated a significant positive association between singing expertise and IAcc, which notably emerged only in professional singers, who significantly outperformed both amateur singers and non-singers. Regression analyses indicated a moderate predictive role of accumulated singing practice for IAcc among trained singers, though emotional awareness partially mediated the relationship between expertise and IAcc. Critically, higher IAcc in non-singers significantly correlated with superior singing accuracy, suggesting enhanced interoception may facilitate singing competence independently of formal vocal training. Altogether, these findings highlight a dual role of interoception, linking it to expert-level singing--partially mediated by emotional awareness-- and independently to musical competence in non-singers. These results reconcile prior inconsistencies by highlighting the embodied nature of singing and the distinct role of musical expertise, while underscoring inherent musically relevant mechanisms beyond practice alone.

Music is a fundamental medium for human communication, yet it remains unclear whether it enables genuine alignment of internally felt emotions beyond mere emotion perception. Creative expression may be central to this process: when performers improvise with creative intent, they engage in self-expression that could draw listeners into closer emotional and physiological resonance. Here, dual-electrocardiography was recorded across 37 performer-listener dyads while performers generated live improvisations under conventional, unconventional, or creative instructions. We show that creative improvisation enhances dyadic emotional alignment for both valence and arousal, and increases cardiac synchronization. Performer-listener alignment was strongest when performers felt and expressed emotions were themselves aligned, and when listeners showed a gradual arousal buildup. Creativity also elicited higher sublimity, lower unease and vitality, and greater diversity of selected emotional labels. These findings establish creativity as a mechanism through which music achieves one of its most celebrated functions: the creation of shared human experience.

Isochrony - as in the regular beat of a metronome - is cross-culturally ubiquitous in music. Is this ubiquity due to a widespread biological inclination for acoustic communication having isochronous structure? If so, it should be present in lesser-studied vocal music, in the absence of musical training, and in comparable non-human species vocalizations. We quantified isochrony in an untrained expression of musicality: improvised songs from non-musician adults and children. We also tested for isochrony in songs from zebra finches, a bird that learns complex songs. We analyzed improvised songs from children (n = 38, 3-10 years old) and adult non-musicians (n = 15, 24-82 years old), and songs from juvenile and adult zebra finches (n= 77, [~]50 and 120 days post-hatch, respectively). Isochrony was expressed in non-musicians improvised songs, and in childrens improvised songs to a comparable degree. In contrast, both juvenile and adult zebra finches produced songs with less isochrony than chance. And although zebra finches learn sequences and durations of their songs elements, we found no evidence for the learning of isochrony. These data show that spontaneous isochrony in learned vocalizations appears differently across these two species. We propose that species variation in chorusing behaviors may explain why.

People synchronize their behavioural and physiological rhythms with each other during social interaction. While interpersonal synchronization has largely been associated with positive effects such as social bonding, some evidence suggests that it may also impair self-regulation and disrupt intrapersonal coordination. Because respiration and heart rhythms are weakly coupled within individuals, we investigated whether synchronizing breathing with another person alters intra-personal cardiorespiratory coupling. Across two experiments, participants synchronized their breathing reciprocally (bidirectional interaction), unidirectionally with a confederate, or with pre-recorded breathing signals, while respiration and electrocardiography (ECG) were continuously measured. Relative phase analyses revealed that bidirectional breathing synchronization induced in-phase synchronization of heart rhythms between individuals. Critically, interpersonal synchronization coincided with cardiorespiratory decoupling: respiration and heart rhythms became more out-of-phase during interaction compared to resting baselines and the unidirectional condition. Moreover, stronger interpersonal respiratory synchronization predicted greater intra-personal cardiorespiratory decoupling, particularly when participants adapted their own breathing to another persons. These findings provide evidence that interpersonal physiological synchronization entails a trade-off with intra-personal physiological coupling, perturbing the phase relationship within ones own physiological system. We propose that aligning ones physiological rhythms with others strengthens self-other coupling but weakens intrapersonal coupling, pointing to a physiological mechanism of self-decoupling during social interaction. Graphical abstractWhen two people synchronize their breathing together, their heart rhythms also synchronize, while their intrapersonal cardiorespiratory rhythms become decoupled, with a perturbed phase-relationship between respiration and cardiac rhythms. Across two experiments, stronger interpersonal respiratory synchronization was associated with more pronounced intrapersonal cardiorespiratory decoupling. These findings suggest a physiological trade-off: aligning bodily rhythms with others strengthens self-other coupling, but may coincide with a phase shift in ones intrinsic cardiorespiratory rhythm. O_FIG O_LINKSMALLFIG WIDTH=200 HEIGHT=96 SRC="FIGDIR/small/679159v2_ufig1.gif" ALT="Figure 1"> View larger version (16K): org.highwire.dtl.DTLVardef@17e4675org.highwire.dtl.DTLVardef@143bf94org.highwire.dtl.DTLVardef@d6b841org.highwire.dtl.DTLVardef@dab5e2_HPS_FORMAT_FIGEXP M_FIG C_FIG

Degradation of motor control across the adult lifespan due to neurobiological decay is well-established. Correspondences between the dynamics of motor behaviour and the timing of musical performance are also well-documented. In light of the former, the conspicuous absence of age as a mediating factor in investigation of the latter reveals a remarkable gap in our understanding of creative performance across the life course. To examine effects of ageing on musical timing, physical tempo of almost 2000 songs released by top-tier recording artists over their decades-long careers were annotated via a listening and tapping task. A series of regression analyses revealed i) an age-driven downward trend in performance tempo for all artists, ii) significant between-artist variation across time, and iii) within-artist variation that was independent of broader musical trends. Overall, tempo decreased by almost one and a half standard deviations from artists early twenties to their late fifties, a rate of decline comparable to that observed in studies of spontaneous motor tempo. Results are consistent with the slowing-with-age hypothesis, and reveal that, not only is such tempo decline discernible in commercial recordings, the impact of age on tempo is overwhelming for artists most physically connected with their music.

The pleasurable urge to move to music - known as groove - has been linked to rhythmic and harmonic complexity via an inverted-U relationship, consistent with predictive coding theory of music. This link has been demonstrated mainly in Western listeners, leaving its cultural generality unclear. Given reports of heightened pitch and harmony sensitivity in Chinese listeners, we predicted stronger responses to harmonic complexity and weaker responses to rhythmic complexity compared with Western listeners. We conducted two online experiments measuring "pleasure" and "wanting to move" ratings for musical excerpts varying in rhythmic and harmonic complexity, comparing Chinese and Danish participants as representatives of Eastern and Western traditions. In Experiment 1, which manipulated both dimensions, both groups showed inverted-U responses to rhythmic complexity, but Danish participants exhibited a sharper curve, indicating greater affective differentiation. No inverted-U pattern emerged for harmonic complexity, and Chinese participants did not show enhanced harmonic sensitivity. Experiment 2 focused on rhythmic complexity using ecologically valid stimuli with finer gradations. Again, Danes showed greater sensitivity to rhythmic variation, reflected in a sharper curvature of their inverted U responses, though peak responses did not differ between groups. Our findings support the universality of predictive responses to rhythmic complexity, while highlighting the modulatory role of cultural exposure in shaping musical affective experiences.

Rhythmic ability has been studied for more than a century in laboratory settings testing timed finger taps. While robust results emerged, it remains unclear whether these findings reflect behavioral limitations in realistic scenarios. This study tested the synchronization-continuation task in a museum with 455 visitors of a wide variety of ages (5-74yrs), musical experiences (0-40yrs) and educational and cultural backgrounds. Adopting a dynamic systems perspective, three metronome pacing periods were anchored around each individuals preferred tempo, and 20% faster and 20% slower. Key laboratory findings were replicated and extended: timing error and variability decreased during childhood and increased in older adults and were lower, even with moderate musical experience. Consistent with an oscillator perspective, timing at non-preferred tempi drifted toward their preferred rate. Overall, these findings demonstrate that timing limitations may reflect attractor properties of a neural oscillator and its signature is still present even in noisy, naturalistic settings.

Sensorimotor synchronization, the ability to align motor behaviour with the temporal structure of external stimuli, is thought to emerge gradually during development, but its origins remain unclear. Here, we investigated whether newborns can adapt their sucking behaviour and synchronise it to the temporal structure of auditory stimuli within the first days of life. Forty-one healthy full-term newborns (24-72 hours old) were exposed to two three-minute auditory streams differing in temporal structure: a highly structured stream with a stable temporal pattern and a highly variant stream with greater temporal variability, while their non-nutritive sucking (NNS) was continuously recorded. We assessed changes in NNS frequency and pressure and quantified NNS-sound coupling using magnitude-squared coherence at frequencies distinctive to each auditory stream. Structured stimulation promoted a more organised NNS, with more suck bursts than the variant stream, and increased sucking vigour, with a transiently higher suck peak rate during the first minute relative to the variant stream and greater suck pressure relative to silence. Coherence analyses revealed that coherence was selectively higher at the frequencies distinctive to each auditory stream, both for the structured and the highly variant stimulus. These findings show that, within hours of birth, NNS behaviour can selectively align with stimulus-specific temporal regularities, even when these are weakly predictable and lack a dominant periodicity. This early capacity to extract temporal structure and coordinate motor behaviour may provide a foundation for the subsequent development of sensorimotor synchronisation.

Empathy enables individuals to attune to others' experiences through shared affective, sensorimotor, and neural representations, but its influence on higher-level decision-making and social alignment remains unknown. We examined whether empathy promotes social conformity and whether this effect depends on physiological arousal, visual attention, and socio-emotional traits. Seventy-three participants completed an empathy-for-pain task followed by a modified random-dot task in which they interacted with previously seen empathy targets, while physiological signals and eye movements were recorded. Drift-diffusion modeling showed that feedback from empathy targets increased conformity, reflected in stronger decision bias toward targets, faster evidence accumulation, and reduced decision conservatism. Visual attention to the eyes or mouth was linked to greater conformity depending on the context. Heart rate variability was unrelated to conformity, whereas phasic skin conductance was associated with smaller bias changes and greater conservatism. Alexithymia and autistic traits further shaped the empathy-conformity relationships. These findings suggest that empathic shared representation extends beyond affective resonance to influence social alignment in decision-making.

Humans coordinate their actions while their bodies and brains synchronize in social interactions, yet how behavioral, physiological, and neural dynamics interact during interpersonal coordination remains largely unknown. We investigated how respiration and individual differences influence behavioral and inter-brain synchrony in a musical synchronization task, which requires precise temporal alignment. Eighty-eight individuals first produced a familiar melody at their most comfortable rate to measure their spontaneous production rate (SPR). They then synchronized the melody with a randomly assigned unfamiliar partner under natural (unpaced), instructed in-phase, and instructed anti-phase breathing conditions, while hyperscanning 64-channel electroencephalography (EEG), respiration, auditory-motor timing, and perceived social connectedness were recorded. Relative to natural respiration, both in-phase and anti-phase breathing increased inter-brain phase-locking and perceived social closeness but reduced behavioral synchrony; the instructed respiratory phase relationship was mirrored in their inter-brain relative phase. Differences in phase of respiratory cycles (inhalation and exhalation) also influenced coordination: Inhalation was associated with stronger inter-brain synchronization but less precise and stable behavioral coordination than was exhalation. Moreover, Individual differences influenced coordination: Partners with the faster SPR consistently preceded the slower partners and exhibited an alpha-band inter-brain phase advance in synchronization, whereas dyads with similar SPR showed greater behavioral synchrony and smaller inter-brain phase difference. Our findings identify respiration as a previously overlooked factor that organizes behavioral and neural synchronization, while individual intrinsic rhythms constrain how interacting partners align in time. Together, these findings reveal a dynamic interplay between the rhythms of the body and brain during human social interactions.

While sounds are essential for human development, existing research primarily emphasizes visual and spatial memory and speech in relation to auditory processes, with a lack of a cohesive understanding of memory mechanisms for non-verbal sounds. This systematic review and coordinate-based meta-analysis of neuroimaging findings aims to comprehensively organize the literature for identifying the key brain mechanisms involved in short-term memory, working memory, and long-term memory for non-verbal auditory information. Additionally, we aimed to identify whether and how individual differences in neural memory processes related to auditory expertise (musicianship), aging or auditory impairments such as amusia are explored in the literature. Our review included ninety studies meeting the selection criteria, with only thirteen studies containing brain coordinates could be included in the meta-analysis. The coordinate-based meta-analysis identified a frontal hub for non-verbal auditory memory encompassing the medial frontal gyrus, cingulate gyrus and superior frontal gyrus.

Interpersonal physiological synchrony (IPS) between interaction partners has been studied as a marker of social connectedness and coordination. However, little is known about how such interpersonal synchrony relates to the intrapersonal coordination of individuals' own autonomic systems during team interaction. The present study examined whether IPS and intrapersonal physiological synchrony (IAPS), defined as the within-person coordination of heart rate (HR), respiration, and electrodermal activity (EDA), function as competing or complementary regulatory processes. It also examined whether IAPS is state- or trait-like and whether teams high or low in both IPS and IAPS had better outcomes. Fifty five newly formed triads (N = 165; Mage = 23.87, 77% female) participated in a laboratory interaction including passive shared experiences and active collaborative tasks while continuous physiological activity was recorded. Synchrony within individuals and between team members was quantified using multidimensional recurrence quantification analysis. Across interaction segments, IAPS was positively associated with IPS in both HR and EDA, with stronger and more consistent associations during active teamwork versus during passive social contexts. These findings contradict a trade-off hypothesis and instead support a synergistic relationship between IAPS and IPS. IAPS exhibited state-like dynamics and sensitivity to features of the context, i.e., consistency within similar interaction contexts and higher in passive versus active social segments. Further, IAPS had limited associations with individual difference measures. Exploratory analyses indicated that teams characterized by both high IAPS and high IPS demonstrated more favorable outcomes, reflected in either higher objective task performance or greater perceived team efficacy depending on physiological modality. Together, these results suggest that effective team coordination is supported not only by IPS but also by the capacity to maintain coherent internal autonomic organization. They further highlight IAPS as a dynamic component of social functioning that merits exploration alongside interpersonal processes.

Our brain maps the space immediately surrounding the body, the peripersonal space (PPS), to sharpen sensory-motor coordination whenever an object enters it. Within PPS, past research demonstrated how several factors influence motor readiness: from exogenous factors, such as body-object distance and stimulus semantics, to endogenous traits like personality traits. Nevertheless, most paradigms rely on vision or touch, relegating hearing to a supporting role and leaving auditory-only contributions unclear. Here, we tested whether affective content and individual traits modulate motor planning for looming sounds that stop within PPS. Thirty-three adults completed three auditory-only tasks in which positive, negative, or neutral sounds halted at five simulated distances from the participants ears (0.3-0.7 m). We recorded anticipatory postural adjustments, distance estimates, affective ratings, and sensory suggestibility via a questionnaire. Motor responses were largely anticipated as sounds stopped nearer the body, while delayed and less precise for semantic (positive or negative) than neutral sounds. Higher suggestibility predicted longer and more variable premotor latencies, particularly for non-semantic sounds. These findings show that auditory cues alone engage flexible sensorimotor mechanisms within PPS, where exogenous (distance, semantics) and endogenous (suggestibility) factors jointly shape motor readiness and spatial perception.

Social bonds are essential for well-being, and moving together to music is a universal means of promoting prosocial behavior and positive affect. However, the functions and interpretations of movement synchrony and music can vary across cultures and may depend on personal values. We examined how interpersonal synchrony and music affect social bonding in participants from individualistic (Denmark, N = 137) and collectivistic (China, N = 226) cultures. Participants watched videos of virtual stick figures - representing themselves (virtual-self) and an unknown person (virtual-other) - moving either synchronously or asynchronously to music or a metronome. After each video, participants rated three indicators of social bonding: their momentary feeling of social connectedness with the virtual-other (Inclusion of Other in the Self, IOS), likeability of the virtual-other, and well-being as the virtual-self. Personal values were measured using the Portrait Value Questionnaire. Music and synchrony promoted all three indicators of social bonding in both cultures, whereas cultural differences emerged in asynchronous conditions. Chinese participants rated the asynchronous virtual-other more likeable than Danish participants, aligning with the collectivistic emphasis on social harmony. Moreover, Chinese participants rated their own well-being higher than Danish participants when the virtual-self moved asynchronously, suggesting greater self-forgiveness in maintaining group harmony. The personal values of benevolence, conformity, and universalism interacted with movement synchrony and cultural background, underscoring the important role of values in interpretations of social interactions. Our findings highlight the universal prosocial effects of music and movement synchrony, while also emphasizing cultural nuances in how these effects are experienced.

Semi-occluded vocal tract (SOVT) exercises are widely used in voice training and therapy, but their immediate electroglottographic (EGG) effects remain incompletely characterized. In this pilot methodological study, six female community singers completed a no-straw baseline recording and then 1-min straw-phonation exercises with four straws (Household metal, Metal VoiceStraw, plastic, and paper), each followed by a no-straw EGG recording. Thirty 1s recordings were analyzed with a standardized pipeline including contact quotient (CQ), waveform skewness, contact-phase rise/fall timing, temporal skewness (s_t), a normalized derivative asymmetry index (NDAI), average-cycle morphology, and EGG spectral descriptors. Relative to baseline, group-mean CQ was higher after all four straws (by 0.027-0.058), waveform skewness and NDAI were lower, and the EGG spectral centroid was lower (by 9.6-15.3%). Contact-phase timing asymmetry did not change consistently: s_t exceeded baseline after three straws and fell below it after one, and the rise/fall ratio decreased in three to five of six participants depending on the straw. Four participants ranked the Metal VoiceStraw first and two ranked paper first. Because every straw condition followed the baseline, warm-up and order effects cannot be separated from straw effects. These hypothesis-generating results identify CQ, waveform skewness, and EGG spectral centroid as candidate endpoints for a larger controlled study

Subjective experiences are hard to capture quantitatively without losing depth and nuance, and subjective report analyses are time-consuming, their interpretation contested. We describe Temporal Experience Tracing, a method that captures relevant aspects of the unified conscious experience over a continuous period of time. The continuous multidimensional description of an experience allows us to computationally reconstruct common experience states. Applied to data from 852 meditations - from novice (n=20) and an experienced (n=12) meditators practising Breathing, Loving-Kindness and Open-Monitoring meditation - we reconstructed four recurring experience states with an average duration of 6:46 min (SD = 5:50 min) and their transition dynamics. Three of the experience states assimilated the three meditation styles practiced, and a fourth experience state represented a common low-motivational, off-task state for both groups. We found that participants in both groups spent more time in the task-related experience state during Loving Kindness meditation than other meditation styles and were less likely to transition into an off-task experience state during Loving Kindness meditation than during Breathing meditation. We demonstrate that drawing the dynamics of experience enables the quantitative analysis of subjective experiences, transforming the time dimension of the stream of consciousness from narrative to measurable.

This study examines the temporal dynamics of expressive piano performance by means of a quantitative analysis of motor timing in an elite pianist, with particular reference to stylistic contrasts between Baroque and Romantic repertoire. In line with kinematic models of expressive timing, which describe musical performance as reflecting principles of biological motion, we examined whether a common temporal structure underlies stylistically divergent executions. Despite marked differences in structural complexity and gesture density, both performances exhibited a shared low-frequency oscillatory pattern ([~]0.36 Hz) in beat-level timing variability. This infra-delta rhythmic modulation is consistent with the presence of an underlying motor timing scaffold and suggests a common temporal organization across expressive behaviors. These findings support the hypothesis that musical performance relies on a rhythmically structured control architecture, potentially shared with other complex motor activities such as speech and locomotion.

Oxytocin has been proposed as a pharmacological target for social dysfunction. However, clinical trials of exogenous oxytocin have yielded modest and inconsistent benefits, highlighting the need for naturalistic, non-pharmacological approaches that recruit endogenous oxytocin. This prospective observational field study examined whether live sports spectating in a modest collegiate setting engages endogenous oxytocin and heart rate synchrony, and how these processes relate to social bonding. Sixty casual spectators at two university basketball games provided salivary samples for oxytocin and cortisol and completed psychological questionnaires before the game, at halftime, and after the game, while heart rate was continuously recorded. Oxytocin dynamics were baseline dependent: individuals with low pre-game oxytocin showed clear increases during spectating, whereas those with high pre-game oxytocin maintained elevated concentrations; across both groups, cortisol decreased and the oxytocin-to-cortisol ratio increased, indicating a shift toward an oxytocin-dominant, low-stress hormonal profile. Live spectating also enhanced heart rate synchrony between spectators, and higher oxytocin levels and stronger synchrony were associated with greater enjoyment, stronger unity with players and fellow fans, higher flow, and stronger intention to revisit. Mediation analyses indicated that perceived unity mediated links between physiological responses and experiential outcomes. These findings identify coordinated oxytocin dynamics and physiological synchrony as candidate mechanisms through which live sports spectating can foster social connection and positive psychological states in everyday, low-stakes settings. Live sports events may represent a simple, scalable non-pharmacological approach to engaging oxytocin-related systems and interpersonal synchrony to promote social connection in everyday life.

Musical training has been associated with enhanced neural processing of sounds, as measured via the frequency following response (FFR), implying the potential for human subcortical neural plasticity. We conducted a large-scale multi-site preregistered study (n > 260) to replicate and extend the findings underpinning this important relationship. We failed to replicate any of the major findings published previously in smaller studies. Musical training was related neither to enhanced spectral encoding strength of a speech stimulus (/da/) in babble nor to a stronger neural-stimulus correlation. Similarly, the strength of neural tracking of a speech sound with a time-varying pitch was not related to either years of musical training or age of onset of musical training. Our findings provide no evidence for plasticity of early auditory responses based on musical training and exposure.

After a right hemisphere stroke, more than half of the patients are impaired in their capacity to produce or comprehend speech prosody. Yet, and despite its social-cognitive consequences for patients, aprosodia following stroke has received scant attention. In this report, we introduce a novel, simple psychophysical procedure which, by combining systematic digital manipulations of speech stimuli and reverse-correlation analysis, allows estimating the internal sensory representations that subtend how individual patients perceive speech prosody, and the level of internal noise that govern behavioral variability in how patients apply these representations. Tested on a sample of N=22 right-hemisphere stroke survivors and N=12 healthy controls, the representation+noise model provides a promising alternative to the clinical gold standard for evaluating aprosodia (MEC): both parameters strongly associate with receptive, and not expressive, aprosodia measured by MEC within the patient group; they have better sensitivity than MEC for separating high-functioning patients from controls; and have good specificity with respect to non-prosody-related impairments of auditory attention and processing. Taken together, individual differences in either internal representation, internal noise, or both, paint a potent portrait of the variety of sensory/cognitive mechanisms that can explain impairments of prosody processing after stroke.