Why Music Moves Us : What entrainment reveals about the relationship between music, body and world

What if listening to music is not the passive process we imagine it to be?

We tend to think that we hear music, internalise it in the brain, and then respond. But what if this sequence is incomplete? What if we already carry music within us, and listening connects our inner music to the world around us?

Recent research on entrainment supports this view. It suggests that sensitivity to musical rhythm begins before birth, while our ability to perceive and move with rhythm becomes increasingly sophisticated throughout our lives (Tichko et al., 2022, pp. 2–4). Rhythm moves us in two ways: it draws the body into motion and changes the way music is experienced. This perspective challenges a longstanding view of musical perception. Our sensitivity to rhythm not only allows us to enjoy music, but enables us to connect with, explore and learn about the world around us.

Rhythm is fundamental

At its core, music is organised through rhythm. Whether we are talking about drum beats or flute melodies, both are formed from sound events organised into patterns. Each beat or note is separated by intervals of time, creating rhythm.

We may hear rhythm as coming from outside us—as music—but what we perceive emerges through an interaction between external rhythms and our own internal rhythmic processes. Through this interaction, we experience pulse: the beat we feel when we listen to music, tap our fingers or bop our heads (Large et al., 2015, p. 10). Neural activity can resonate with these hierarchically nested patterns in music. In other words, our sense of musical rhythm emerges from the interaction between external stimulus and internal experience—a coupling of body, brain and environment.

Rhythm is everywhere

Rhythms exist not only in music, but all around us: in birdsong, police sirens and the grinding of engines and machinery. We experience rhythm in the cycles of days, weeks and years, and discern it in the rotation of planets. Rhythms also appear internally, in our heartbeat, breathing and sleep cycles. We are so accustomed to aligning with these rhythms that disrupting them can affect our health, as we experience in jet lag or disordered sleep.

Our ability to align with internal and external rhythms is fundamental to life and to being human. In science, the process through which independent rhythms become coordinated is called entrainment.

Entrainment

Entrainment occurs when two or more independent rhythmic systems interact and become temporally coordinated (Clayton, 2012, p. 49). In music, however, entrainment is often one-directional: a listener may coordinate their movement with a recording, while the recording itself remains unchanged. Even so, this coordination can alter how the listener perceives and interprets the music, reshaping its experienced meaning (Schiavio et al., 2024, p. 1). A heartbeat provides one example of a rhythmic system; a pendulum provides another. We see entrainment in the timing of turn-taking during conversation, when breathing patterns fall into rapport, when our body clock aligns with the cycles of day and night, or when two pendulums fall into coordination.

Entrainment is thus one mechanism through which our internal rhythms coordinate with rhythms in the world around us. It involves forms of synchronisation that occur ‘inside our bodies’, ‘between people’ and ‘between groups of people’ (Clayton, 2012, p. 51), as well as with cycles in the natural environment. Research has linked interpersonal synchrony with outcomes including increased liking, cooperation, helpfulness and empathy, giving entrainment the potential to shape social relationships (Schiavio et al., 2024, pp. 5–6).

Rhythmic sensitivity begins early

Our sensitivity to rhythm begins before birth, while our rhythmic abilities become increasingly sophisticated throughout our lives (Tichko et al., 2022, pp. 2–4). This development includes an increasing capacity to respond to musical frequencies and structures. Music unfolds across multiple nested layers of rhythm, including beats and their subdivisions, phrases and larger song structures. Neural activity can track rhythmic frequencies at different levels and reflect this hierarchical structure. EEG and MEG studies indicate that delta and theta activity resonate with rhythmic frequencies, while beta activity in auditory and sensorimotor regions anticipates the temporal position of musical beats (Tichko et al., 2022, pp. 4–5).

But we do not only respond to music; our brains can add to what is physically present in the sound. Neural models and EEG research indicate that the brain can generate activity at implied pulse and metric frequencies, even when those frequencies are absent from the acoustic signal (Large et al., 2015; Tichko et al., 2022, pp. 10–11). This helps explain how we maintain a pulse and keep time with complex or syncopated music.

In Afro-Latin music, clave provides a useful analogy. It acts as an internalised organising rhythm that holds the music together, even when it is not explicitly sounded. In a similar way, our felt pulse helps us anticipate what comes next—a capacity central to musical listening and anticipation. Musical anticipation is closely associated with the brain’s dopamine reward system, which contributes to the pleasure we derive from music (Salimpoor et al., 2011, p. 260).

Beyond the brain: music as an enactive process

A traditional perspective holds that music enters through the ears, reaches the brain and is converted into a mental representation, whereupon we ‘hear’ music (Witek, 2023, p. 161). This account reflects a representational view of cognition—one increasingly challenged by embodied and enactive approaches. Research on entrainment offers a different account: music is not experienced solely as a mental representation inside the head, but enacted in real time through engagement with the environment. This expands the site of cognition beyond the brain to include elements ‘outside’ us.

This theoretical approach is known as enactivism. Applied to music, it suggests that the mind is not reducible to the brain and body in isolation (Witek, 2023, p. 165). It proposes that the mind is a ‘multisensory system’ involving collaboration between brain, body and environment (Witek, 2023, p. 172). In this view, the experience of music is not something we passively consume, but something we actively co-create. It replaces the idea that music is passively interpreted inside our heads with the view that musical experience is enacted in real time through the interaction of brain, body and environment—including musicians, location and instruments.

Let’s illustrate this with an example.

Imagine you are dancing to music at home. Your neural activity and bodily movement begin to synchronise with the rhythms in the music. You begin to anticipate each beat, placing each foot and hip in time with what is coming. Your body helps you feel the rhythm and adjust your timing; even when the music drops out temporarily, you feel an internal pulse that enables you to continue moving as you wait for the next beat.

Anticipating the next beat engages the brain’s reward system, contributing to the pleasure you experience. When the beat returns, you move more intensely and become more immersed in the music. This begins to affect how you hear it.

At first, you hear the music’s most immediately apparent elements—its melody, overall rhythm and texture. But now, as you become more deeply immersed in the music, you start to hear new parts—subtle rhythms in the background, harmonies and new musical relationships.

The environment helps deepen your immersion: the lights are low and the room is private. The room also takes on a new character as your immersion deepens, which in turn affects how you move, feel and respond to the music.

This example highlights how the experience of music does not simply travel from the radio speakers to your ear, but is co-created through a combination of brain, body, music and environment. You participate creatively in this process, shaping a unique musical experience in the moment. This creates a feedback loop between music, body, brain and environment.

Our experience of music is also coloured by cultural knowledge, personal history and social expectations (Witek, 2023, p. 175). This includes the way people move, the way rhythms are performed and the meaning imparted to the experience—all of which form part of social and cultural history (Witek, 2023, p. 175), adding another layer to the co-creation of musical experience.

Why does this matter?

Our sensitivity to rhythm begins early and develops throughout our lives. Entrainment allows neural and bodily activity to align with rhythmic stimuli such as music. During this process, brain activity can resonate with multiple nested levels of musical structure. Yet we do not merely respond to a musical stimulus; we actively participate in creating our experience of it.

When we listen to music, we respond with brain and body while taking cues from the environment. This creates a feedback loop: our bodies respond in real time, and those responses in turn affect our experience of both the music and the surrounding environment. Entrainment is one mechanism through which an organism coordinates with its environment through rhythm. It also has an interpersonal dimension: in many contexts, rhythmic coordination can help establish social bonds.

Entrainment acts as a connector, allowing our inner world to meet the outer world. Rhythm facilitates this connection—whether in music, with nature or between people. From the alignment of breathing between friends, to immersion in music, our capacity to entrain can transform experience, shaping how humans learn and relate in the world.

References

Clayton, M. (2012) ‘What is entrainment? Definition and applications in musical research’, Empirical Musicology Review, 7(1–2), pp. 49–56. Available at: https://doi.org/10.18061/1811/52979 (Accessed: 17 July 2026).

Large, E.W., Herrera, J.A. and Velasco, M.J. (2015) ‘Neural networks for beat perception in musical rhythm’, Frontiers in Systems Neuroscience, 9, Article 159. Available at: https://doi.org/10.3389/fnsys.2015.00159 (Accessed: 17 July 2026).

Salimpoor, V.N., Benovoy, M., Larcher, K., Dagher, A. and Zatorre, R.J. (2011) ‘Anatomically distinct dopamine release during anticipation and experience of peak emotion to music’, Nature Neuroscience, 14, pp. 257–262. Available at: https://doi.org/10.1038/nn.2726 (Accessed: 22 July 2026).

Schiavio, A., Witek, M.A.G. and Stupacher, J. (2024) ‘Meaning-making and creativity in musical entrainment’, Frontiers in Psychology, 14, Article 1326773. Available at: https://doi.org/10.3389/fpsyg.2023.1326773 (Accessed: 17 July 2026).

Tichko, P., Kim, J.C. and Large, E.W. (2022) ‘A dynamical, radically embodied, and ecological theory of rhythm development’, Frontiers in Psychology, 13, Article 653696. Available at: https://doi.org/10.3389/fpsyg.2022.653696 (Accessed: 17 July 2026).

Witek, M.A.G. (2023) ‘Rhythmic entrainment and embodied cognition’, in Margulis, E.H., Loui, P. and Loughridge, D. (eds.) The Science-Music Borderlands: Reckoning with the Past and Imagining the Future. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, pp. 161–182. Available at: https://doi.org/10.7551/mitpress/14186.003.0015 (Accessed: 17 July 2026).