Musical Social Entrainment

Abstract

Over the last decade, the concept of entrainment—emerging from the fields of physics and biology—has grown as a tool for investigating rhythmic adjustments among musicians, and between different groups of musicians. When combined with methods of audio data analysis, this approach has benefits for the assessment of musical behavior, previously limited to largely descriptive ethnomusicological research based on ethnographic data collected through field study. However, musical behavior is not only biophysically determined, but also a highly social activity. Therefore, this article focuses on “social entrainment”—a concept coined by the social scientists Joseph E. McGrath and Janice R. Kelly in 1986 which recently has been taken up in music research. Relating this concept to certain approaches in relevant current empirical studies on interpersonal coordination, the authors develop their own categories of social behavior, which are broader than those of social entrainment but can accordingly be applied to the social entrainment that may occur in musical practices. These categories range from basic behaviors that do not involve social cognition but are meaningful to interacting individuals and groups, to high-order social behaviors that require collective intentionality and can lead to sophisticated interaction involving music-specific phenomena such as a “groove.” Consequently, a concept of entrainment which goes beyond both an adaptation of the established concept of physical and biological entrainment and McGrath and Kelly’s original concept of social entrainment is proposed: “musical social entrainment.” The authors use this term to refer to intra-individual, inter-individual, intra-group, and inter-group entrainment to exogenous musical rhythms—including the rhythms of other musically acting individuals and groups—embedded in a social context and contributing to sociality. Finally, reviewing selected studies relevant to musical social entrainment, the authors discuss problems and open questions concerning music-related entrainment research, and potential contributions in the future of entrainment studies in general.