Report: Guitarists' brains swing in tune

Matt-White

Berlin - When guitarists get together and things get loud, it is not just the music that is in tune: new European research published on Tuesday shows that their brainwaves are also in synch.

Scientists took eight different guitar duos in the laboratory, attached electrodes to their scalps and got them to play a short jazz fusion melody up to 60 times while they recorded their brains' electrical activity.

The researchers from Berlin's Max Planck Institute for Human Development and the University of Salzburg in Austria found that brainwave similarities between the musicians' brains increased significantly.

And this was not just as they played - their brains also got in the same groove as they listened to a metronome as they got ready to play, the Max Planck Institute said in research published in the BMC Neuroscience journal.

"Our findings show that interpersonally coordinated actions are preceded and accompanied by between-brain oscillatory couplings," said Max Planck's Ulman Lindenberger, one of the authors.

The study is the first of its kind - only individuals' brains have been observed tuning into music before - and the results potentially have wider implications for understanding how people's brains interact.

- AFP (on News24)

FatBoy

Interesting! Please tell me that this will mean in about 3 years no-one will be using click tracks anymore!! Hahah :-[

FenderBender

Amazing!

Next time anyone gets GAS flack from a partner, they should lob an axe at their other half and jam a while ?

Manfred-Klose

shows that their brainwaves are also in synch.

It's like when me and my buddies have a jam, we have been jamming together since shcool days, so when we get together it is really easy to read each others mind when jamming(like knowing when something unexpected will show up in the song), strange how it works? but it does work through trial and error of many hours of jamming.

Spyke

I've jammed with a few mates of varying skill levels over the years and there's only a few that I click with.
And when I say click, I mean as in seriously. Dean is the scariest. We can be jamming a simple piece, licks over riffs and vice verse and we'll just 'know' when to change, hold a chord, build a crescendo etc. It's eerie but I love it - we make awesome music together.

Keira-WitherKay

mmm i guess the guitarists brain waves would link up or sync up since they both thinking about the same piece of music and if they playing it together then at the very same time.... so kinda makes sense to me ...

heheheh lol i should try that experiment with not 2 guitarists... but a drummer and a guitarist playing the same piece....... but i guess they don't need to cos they already have eveidence that the drummers brainwaves would always speed up .........

sorry couldn't resist the bad humour

peace and light
Keira

Bob-Dubery

Keira WitherKay wrote mmm i guess the guitarists brain waves would link up or sync up since they both thinking about the same piece of music and if they playing it together then at the very same time.... so kinda makes sense to me ... t

Exactly. I didn't find this report so surprising. When musicians are playing together one of the most important things is that they have to keep time with each other. They have to be keeping - conciously or otherwise - a count in their head and divide that count into smaller portions. So quite naturally and quite unsurprisingly their brains will be in sync to a degree.

Gearhead

Thought about that too. It would occur to me though, that one can devise a test to check if that's the case - different tempos, different instruments, record and play back etc. until it is clear whether the syncing of the brain waves is down to having a common task or if there really is communication. Then try to take away eye contact, and so forth. Should be fun experiments to do ?

Wizard

Keira WitherKay wrote but i guess they don't need to cos they already have eveidence that the drummers brainwaves would always speed up .........

Found that when inexperienced drummers play together, they always speed up.
Got a theory why.
When an individual finds themselves out of time with the rest of the group, they speed up to catch the next beat.
En masse - leads to the whole mob speeding up.

Another theory.
You have people who are able to set tempo, and people who like to follow tempo.
If you have a drummer who is in the latter group, he actually tries to follow the rhythm of the rest rather than set it ... and the whole thing speeds up again.

[deleted]

I find this topic very interesting. I suppose the same woukd go for people dancing together. I wonder if the same thing happens when people watch a movie together?

Manfred-Klose

I wonder if the same thing happens when people watch a movie together?

Like when you know what is going to happen in the movie, but you keep on watching just to find out if it will happen, until some idiot spoils everthing and tells what is going to happen while you are watching, and everyone's rhytmn towards the movie is spoiled.

Gearhead

Let's not get offtopic now. The point about brainwaves in sync during a joint effort to play music may have something to do with the one person responding to actions by the other or with people synchronising to a shared subconscious communication. The former is part of what is mostly known as 'joint attention' and the latter is what they're trying to prove happens (or does not happen). There is not even joint attention in consuming a movie together regardless of whether you know the plot or not; joint attention is when you point an index finger and the other person looks where you're pointing rather than at your finger (try this with your dog and you'll understand why there's a difference). This phenomenon is well understood, the study is about whether there's more going on.

[deleted]

So there would be quite a lot of joint attention between a teacher and student then, hopefully.