If you’re in a band, you’d know that a successful performance depends on all the musicians playing in rhythm. Now one study claims that this kind of musical synchronisation can have other benefits, such as helping to strengthen the bonds between those who make music together.

British and Australian researchers came to this intriguing conclusion after conducting an experiment with 49 students aged between 18 and 25. The volunteers were divided into groups of two or three, before being asked to perform a music-making exercise. They were asked to play percussion during 10-minute jam sessions, using Midi keyboards.

At the same time, the study participants were asked to rate, on a minute-by-minute basis, the sense of belonging they felt towards their respective group members. Their general level of happiness was also measured before and after the jam sessions, so that the academics could determine whether making music together was good for morale.

It turned out that the more participants played in time, synchronising rhythms with other members of their group, the closer they felt to them. The researchers did not observe the same phenomenon in volunteers who did not synchronise with their fellow percussionists.

“There seems to be a basic need to experience being ‘in sync’ with other people because it emerged naturally within a few minutes within over half of the groups of two or three people we recruited,” study co-author, professor Warren Mansell, told Psypost.

Interestingly, the volunteers who played in time with their peers felt closer to them even though they didn’t know them before the experiment. This suggests that the simple act of making music in a group could reinforce the sense of belonging or connectedness.

But it’s not enough to make people happier, it seems. “Happiness ratings before the music task were not different from the happiness ratings after the task, suggesting that such feelings were not influenced by the general music-making activity or synchronisation occurrence,” professor Warren Mansell and colleagues noted in their study, published in the journal Psychology of Music.

Despite certain methodological limitations, this research shows that group music-making can be a powerful vector for social bonding, and opens up interesting perspectives on how music can enhance prosocial behaviour.

So, don’t hesitate to make music with your loved ones to strengthen the bonds among you.