Joint Music Listening Aligns Brain Activity and Pleasure Responses

A study in *Cortex* examined how sharing music with a close friend shapes emotional pleasure and brain activity. Thirty-four pairs of friends (68 participants, mean age 21, mostly young adult women) listened to fifteen 40-second clips alone or face-to-face while rating pleasure on a 0-100 slider. Functional near-infrared spectroscopy (fNIRS) recorded prefrontal blood-oxygen changes.

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Each playlist mixed five participant-chosen favorites, five friend-chosen favorites, and five researcher-selected pop songs matched acoustically. In the solo condition participants sat alone; in the joint condition they faced each other. fNIRS recorded moment-to-moment oxygenation, and synchrony was measured by aligning the two participants’ neural time series.

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Joint listening boosted prefrontal oxygenation and yielded greater interpersonal neural synchrony than solo listening. Synchrony rose with moment-by-moment similarity in pleasure ratings, particularly for the friend’s favorite tracks. Researchers noted fNIRS allowed natural movement in a social setting. Funding came from the French National Research Agency for potential clinical uses such as music-based therapy.

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Because only close friends participated, results may not generalize to strangers. Individual differences were marked; some pairs showed strong alignment, others did not. fNIRS has lower spatial resolution than MRI, limiting precise activity localization. Authors warn against assuming any co-listener automatically boosts synchrony.

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Earlier studies gave mixed results on shared music’s impact on pleasure, a gap this work narrows but does not close. Ongoing analyses will assess movement synchrony and song-memory retention. Links to neurochemicals like oxytocin or serotonin remain untested.

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Showing that music aligns affective experience and neural patterns offers a measurable marker of social attunement, potentially aiding therapies that rely on patient-clinician emotional resonance.

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• “We were interested in better understanding how sharing music influences both our emotions and our brain activity,” — Federico Curzel, Postdoctoral Fellow, University of Pavia

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• “We were surprised to find that shared listening increased pleasure specifically for the friend’s favorite songs, rather than in a general way,” — Federico Curzel

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• “Our findings suggest that when we share music with a friend, we don’t just listen together, we actually experience it more similarly,” — Federico Curzel

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• “The more closely their pleasure responses matched moment by moment, the more their brain activity synchronized, but only when they were physically together,” — Federico Curzel

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The team plans to extend the paradigm to clinical populations, explore oxytocin-mediated mechanisms, and release an open-source tool for estimating anatomical coordinates from fNIRS video recordings.

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