Empathy in Musical Interaction

Abstract

Entrainment has been linked to positive affect and pro-sociality, e.g. empathy. Empathy and entrainment are facets of the “shared manifold”, mirroring and mental simulation system allowing us to automatically share emotions and intentions, and to understand others. They are foregrounded in music, which is very efficacious in communicating emotions and intentions. We perceive the intentional, expressive motor acts behind the sounds of music. Music therapists take advantage of this and use musical interaction to work with their clients. The cognitive foundations of synchronisation have been studied extensively, but its emotional aspects only rarely and the methods of entrainment research have only rarely been used in music therapy research, which has mainly focussed on qualitative case studies. Our aims are to study the associations between empathy, en-trainment and musical communication. In dyadic tapping tasks, participants started in different tempi and later on started to hear each other’s tapping. We also carried out an exploratory case study analysing the tim-ing characteristics of a client and therapist in videos of music therapy improvisation sessions. In both cases we analysed whether and how the players entrained and the contributing factors. The link between entrainment and empathy is not linear; we discuss e.g. the effects of pair constitution and task difficulty and the character-istics of bouts of entrained and non-entrained behaviours in the music therapy session.