Into the Hive-Mind: Shared Absorption and Cardiac Interrelations in Expert and Student String Quartets

Expert musicians portray awe-inspiring precision, timing, and phrasing may be thought to partake in a “hive-mind.” Such shared musical absorption is characterized by heightened empathic relation, mutual trust, sense that the music “takes over,” thus uniting performers’ intentions. Previous studies have found correlations between concern or experience cardiac synchrony (CS). We aimed investigate terms of CS analyzing two quartets: student quartet, Borealis String Quartet (BSQ), an expert Danish (DSQ), world-renowned for their interpretations cohesion. These quartets performed same Haydn excerpt seven conditions, some which were designed disrupt absorption. Using multidimensional recurrence quantification analysis (MdRQA), we that: (1) performing resulted significantly increased both compared with resting; (2) across all DSQ had higher than BSQ; (3) BSQ's was inversely correlated degree disruption; 4) DSQ, remained constant levels disruption, besides one added extreme disruption—a sight-reading condition. findings tentatively support claim absorption, as well group expertise, CS.