The term ‘music’ is thrown around a lot, but as a music educator, musician, conductor and researcher, I spend a great deal of time helping people understand the different experiences of music, depending on the vehicle through which you are  experiencing it.

Music listening is exactly what it says on the label, listening to music. However there are so many variants of listening. There is passive listening, such as music playing in the background at a café or in a lift – we aren’t paying attention to it and in many ways our auditory processing networks have categorised those sounds as present but not of interest to us.

There is active listening, which we would be doing when we sit in a concert hall listening to an orchestra. We aren’t moving around very much but we are focusing our attention on the sounds and actions on stage. Our brains are following the auditory story of the music, and we can often get engulfed by the emotional journey we are being taken on.

Then there is what I would call embodied listening. This would be at a concert where we are jumping and dancing to the music we are hearing and seeing. Our auditory networks and motor cortex are firing together, allowing the music to engage our limbs and bodies, and as it turns out our bodies are feeding information back to our brains. This type of listening activates more of the brain because it requires a synchronicity between more parts at once. As an added bonus, moving to music is the trigger for our immune systems to kick into gear. It is no wonder that when we dance and move to music, even in our own loungerooms, the music makes us feel good.

It is a much more complex and, in my opinion, far more powerful experience when we make music together. When we sing together our heartbeats align and our body temperatures can normalise. We feel togetherness on a physiological level. When we play musical instruments together we not only experience the physiological alignments, but we also engage large areas of our prefrontal lobe where our executive functions live. These are the group of skills that help us maintain attention, access our cognitive flexibility when we need to adapt to new information and manage our own emotions.

Every once in a while a true piece of magic occurs. When we are playing music together we can get into a state coined by Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi as ‘flow’. Flow is a state of mind that occurs when a person is totally immersed in an activity. In music we might use the word ‘groove’, or in sports it is ‘being in the zone’. It is often a feeling we have on an individual level, but there is a rare form of flow called team flow. Team flow is when a group of people enter a flow state simultaneously. Think of the slow motion scene at the end of a movie about a struggling soccer team as they finally come together to win the game.

Team flow is uncommon and unpredictable. If you have ever felt it, it usually occurs when you least expect it and you will probably only register it happening just before it is about to end. But playing music is a fantastic way to study the state of team flow. In 2021, a study led by Mohammad Shehata from the California Institute of Technology used music as a tool to identify when team flow occurred, and which parts of the brain light up. There is a part of the brain that lights up during flow and another part that lights up during teamwork. The researchers expected that those two areas would show greater connection during team flow, but to their surprise an entirely new area of the brain lit up. Team flow is truly unique within our brains and because of this uniqueness, we are unlikely to forget it.

I have experienced team flow a few times in my musical career. While I have loved the personal experiences of team flow when I have been performing, by far the most moving experience was when I was conducting one of my concert bands. The performance was at a new venue for an audience of parents from our school and two other schools. I had chosen a piece that was a stretch for the group. It was one of those pieces that had a high level of risk attached. If everything worked perfectly it would sound incredible, but if just one player was not playing at their top level, the piece could literally come to a grinding halt.

Fear is a great motivator as well as an experience that students need in order to grow cognitively. They need to be put into situations where failure is likely because this is where they learn how persistence and resilience feels, and how to use their training to grow from the experience, no matter what happens.

As a conductor, especially of children, I need to walk on stage and project total confidence and belief that things will go as planned. I did just that, but inside I was thinking “well let’s just see how this goes”. I could walk you through the delicacy of the first note, the precision of the transitions, and the vibrancy and musicality of the ending. But the real joy and the considerable natural high came after the last note died away. As the students walked off stage their eyes were very wide, the smiles were plastered across their faces and they were looking to me with questions like, “Did that really just happen?” and “Was that good? It felt really good, was it good?”

I now know that every single one of their brains probably had fireworks exploding in the new area, the team flow area. I also know that the feeling, the hard work and the potential for failure is etched into their life stories now. I was both immensely proud of the students’ achievement as well as personally impacted by the benefits of music on my own cognitive and emotional health. It is an addictive experience and one that I search for again in every performance I am involved in.