Music is widely recognized as a powerful force for bringing people together, but how specific musical features promote social bonding in the brain has remained unclear.
A new Yale study published in the Journal of Neuroscience provides evidence that predictable musical chord progressions enhance social connectedness by engaging and synchronizing neural systems involved in social perception and interaction—especially during live face-to-face engagement.
In the study, researchers tested the hypothesis that structured, consonant chord progressions promote social bonding between pairs of people by aligning their neural processing of sound over time.
Twenty dyads (equal numbers of male and female participants) listened to two musical conditions composed of identical notes: one arranged in a predictable chord progression and the other presented in an unstructured, unpredictable sequence. While listening, participants either gazed at a live partner’s face or avoided face gaze.
Using simultaneous functional near-infrared spectroscopy (fNIRS) to record brain activity from both partners, the researchers found that structured chord progressions combined with live face gaze significantly increased activity in brain regions associated with social cognition and integration, including the right angular gyrus, right somatosensory association cortex, and bilateral dorsolateral prefrontal cortex.
Importantly, participants’ subjective feelings of social connectedness were linked to neural activity in the right superior and middle temporal gyri during face gaze, and to right angular gyrus activity during structured chord progressions. The study also observed increased cross-brain neural synchrony between partners, suggesting that predictable musical structure may help align neural processing across individuals during social interaction.
"These findings provide a plausible neural mechanism for why music—especially music with predictable harmonic structure—can feel socially connecting,” according to the authors, who include co-first author Dash A. Watts, research assistant in psychiatry; co-first author AZA Allsop, MD, PhD, assistant professor of psychiatry; and senior author Joy Hirsch, PhD, Elizabeth Mears and House Jameson Professor of Psychiatry and professor of comparative medicine and of neuroscience. “Chord progressions appear to be a salient musical feature that upregulates social neural systems, particularly in the context of live, face-to-face interaction.”
The results advance a long-sought evidence-based framework linking specific musical features to neural systems underlying social behavior. While music has been proposed as a therapeutic tool for social isolation and disconnection, few studies have directly tied musical structure to measurable changes in social brain networks.
By combining dyadic neuroimaging, live social interaction, and controlled musical stimuli, the study demonstrates that predictable chord progressions engage neural circuits associated with social attention, sensory integration, and executive processing, supporting behaviors such as sustained eye contact and perceived interpersonal closeness.
The authors suggest these findings may inform future therapeutic approaches using music to support individuals experiencing social disconnection, loneliness, or related neuropsychiatric conditions, and highlight chord progressions as a promising target for music-based interventions.
Other Yale authors include Adam Noah, PhD, associate research scientist in psychiatry; Xian Zhang, PhD, associate research scientist in psychiatry; and Simone Compton, former postgraduate associate in psychiatry.