On August 25, 2024, neuroscientist, musician and author, Daniel Levitin, published an op-ed in The Washington Post, entitled “A Playlist for Peace Talks.” The last half of this article quotes our founder, Jonathan Dimmock, in great detail, including underscoring the wisdom of the prescient need to incorporate the musical arts into international conflict resolution. Citing the singular approach of The Resonance Project, and quoting Barack Obama’s rather extensive condoning of the same, this is a tremendous boost for our work!
By Daniel J. Levitin
August 25, 2024 at 7:00 a.m. EDT
Daniel J. Levitin is a neuroscientist, musician and author. This op-ed is adapted from his forthcoming book, “I Heard There Was a Secret Chord: Music as Medicine.”
The Congress of Vienna convened heads of European states in 1814 to settle many of the issues that arose after a series of destabilizing events: the French Revolution, the dissolution of the Holy Roman Empire and the ongoing Napoleonic Wars. For negotiations to have a shot at success, they’d need something to cut through the heightened suspicion and tension. Their solution? Beethoven. The composer, who wrote some of the most beautiful and transcendent music we know, arranged and performed several pieces for those assembled, including his Seventh and Eighth Symphonies. The Seventh Symphony has long been one of my favorite pieces of music. It begins with a number of musical gestures that demand attention — shifts from loud to soft, from fast rhythms to lilting ones. But it is the second movement that is etched in my memory, a remnant of playing clarinet in a middle-school orchestra. Its opening harmonic motion is delicate and nuanced, and before I even knew of its being written for a peace negotiation, I had long found the piece would instantly evoke calm.
I have been thinking about this a lot recently — as I scroll through worlds of division and strife here and abroad. I picture that gilded room in Vienna, filled with heads of state listening to a new work by the era’s greatest composer as a prelude to peacemaking. Historians still disagree about the provisions agreed to during the congress, but many believe that the Congress of Vienna successfully prevented any further large and protracted European wars for the next hundred years. Could music’s presence have had something to do with that? If so, maybe it could be conducive to the peacekeeping and fence-mending we need today, and even soothe our frayed psyches in the process.
My work as a neuroscientist has become increasingly focused on this question. It turns out that music can have a diplomatic effect, one that can perhaps be applied to our situation today. And experiments in my lab, collaborating with neuroscientists Jeffrey Mogil and Loren Martin, show us that playing music together can increase empathy. There are several standardized ways of measuring empathy in a laboratory experiment; the one we used is based on the well-established phenomenon that people who care about each other dislike seeing one another in pain. We induce pain in the laboratory by asking people to hold their hand in a bucket of ice water (0–4 degrees C) for as long as they can. This becomes surprisingly painful within a short amount of time, and most people don’t last more than two minutes.
We asked one participant, the “experiencer,” to do this while another, the “onlooker,” watched. When the two people in the lab were close friends (on average, knowing each other for at least three years and spending more than 130 hours together the previous month), understandably, the onlooker’s ratings of distress, discomfort and empathy were higher than when the onlooker was a stranger. Then, we introduced a twist: We recruited strangers and asked them to play the video game Rock Band together before they were made experiencer and onlooker in the pain task. That simple intervention, of playing a musical game together for 20 minutes, brought on levels of empathy equivalent to being close friends for three years. We don’t know how long that empathy lasted after the experiment, but the finding was striking.
Even just listening to music together can foster a similar connection. My colleague Vinod Menon, our postdoctoral fellow Dan Abrams and I were interested to know what happens in the brains of people who listen to the same musical pieces, even if not simultaneously. We anticipated that there would be vast differences in activation, because first, no two brains are alike, and second, not everyone reacts to a piece of music in the same way. Reactions to music are based on a lifetime of listening, individual preferences and the momentary mood we’re in as we listen. Indeed, your own brain activations to a single piece of music are likely to differ from one listen to the next. Turns out, that’s not the whole story. The brain waves of people listening to the same piece of music actually synchronized, in spite of these differences. Synchronization refers to the phenomenon where neural responses in different individuals become aligned in time, showing matching patterns of activity in response to the same stimulus — in this case, music. Common structures spanning the whole brain, from the frontal lobes to the parietal, the limbic system and the brain’s control centers in the cingulate gyrus and insular cortex, had come into harmony with one another. Our study demonstrates, at a neurobiological level, the unifying power of music. What could this mean for healing and interpersonal, intergroup conflict outside of a lab?
Soon after our paper was published, I met a concert organist, Jonathan Dimmock. “What if government leaders could listen to music together before they sit down to negotiate treaties and trade agreements?” Dimmock asked. He founded an organization, the Resonance Project, to answer that question, and toured the world promoting live music as a tool for resolving international conflict.
One block to getting along with others is a lack of trust, a suspicion that what we want is not the same as what they want, and that, accordingly, they wish to take advantage of us. Jonathan Dimmock’s idea was that entrenched positions, rhetoric and language become walls that we hide behind, and that perhaps music can lower them and increase trust. That’s because listening to music releases oxytocin, a neurochemical that promotes trust and bonding among people — it’s the same neurochemical released in mother and an infant during nursing. Oxytocin helps to promote a calm sense of security and, from there, negotiations become productive.
That became the driving principle behind the Resonance Project. They provide ensembles of exceptional musicians who perform carefully curated musical selections midway through negotiations or conferences. “The effect of this simple catalyst can change the course of a meeting,” Dimmock observes, “as each listener’s brain aligns its wave patterns with those of others in the space, enabling a heightened desire to compromise.” One fan of the program — former president Barack Obama — wrote in 2015 that music can “help us bridge our differences and show us we are heirs to a fundamental truth: that out of many, we are one.”
Our world today is rife with divisions that music could help ease. In the United States, a large proportion of citizens believe that one party’s success in the upcoming presidential election could result in the fall of democracy itself. At the global level, tensions are running high and at least six kinetic wars are ongoing: Russia-Ukraine; Israel-Hamas; civil wars in Sudan, Syria, Myanmar and Somalia. In many of these disputes, traditional negotiations have yet to pave any path to conflict resolution.
The arts — literature, theater, visual art, dance and music — deliver a power that we don’t readily find in other modes of human expression. Spoken discourse is literal and referential; it tends to be about specific things. The arts more typically rely on metaphor and strive to convey emotional truth in place of literal truth. My friend, the conductor Kent Nagano,, paraphrasing Northrop Frye, says: “Bigots and fanatics seldom have any use for the arts, because they are so preoccupied with their beliefs and actions that they can’t imagine anything else as possibilities.” A work of art can introduce us to new thoughts and ideas, expose us to the lives of people whose experiences are very different from our own. Through this uniquely human invention, art can foster empathy, reduce prejudice. It can engage our compassion rather than our tendency to judge; arouse our interest and curiosity rather than suspicion. It is often said that you can’t argue a person out of a position they didn’t argue themselves into. In other words, if a person reaches an opinion based on emotion, all the appeals to facts and figures and logic in the world can’t change their mind. But the right piece of art can do that. By opening up a person’s heart, the arts can cause them to see things differently and have a “change of heart.”
For tens of thousands of years, music has been used to bring people together in this way — to ease interpersonal tensions, to defuse rivalries around ancient campfires and through rituals involving group singing. Negotiations, instead, are envisioned as sterile talks led by world leaders in closed-door meetings. Perhaps it is time to reunite these two parts of our lives — scientific advances in the past 10 years have surely provided a rational basis for giving this “sonic diplomacy” a try.
As a performing musician, I’ve seen firsthand how music brings people together. Unlike at a ballgame, where half the audience wants one team to fail, everyone at a concert wants the musicians to succeed. As Victor Wooten says, “I don’t worry about whether the audience loves me or not — the ones that don’t didn’t buy tickets!” And did you ever notice? While the band is playing, no one cares who the person next to them voted for or where their family is from. From the moment the first note plays, everyone in the room is united by a common pursuit — to experience emotions that words cannot convey; to sing and dance; to have fun; to weep; perhaps to dream.
We are all different people when we enter the concert hall; we are as one when we leave. Music is, at its heart, both communal and intensely private at the same time. What other human activity can be experienced with tens of thousands of others and still feel so personal? That dual nature is the secret to music’s power. And it may be what saves humanity from our selfishness, drawing us closer to what Abraham Lincoln, that great unifier, called the angels of our better nature.
