The Live Concert of Brains: Performer-Audience Neural Coupling Links Ensemble Coordination to Shared Audience Integration

Abstract

Collective social events often require coordinated action by one group to become shared experience in another, yet how this transformation is organized across multiple brains remains unclear. Live music provides a tractable model of this problem because ensemble coordination, performer-audience alignment, and shared audience integration unfold within the same event. Here we tested whether performer-audience neural coupling acts as a cross-role neural interface linking ensemble coordination to shared audience integration. We recorded brain activity from a nine-person live performance system, consisting of a fixed three-performer ensemble and four independent audience groups, using synchronized multi-device functional near-infrared spectroscopy hyperscanning across live trio performance sessions. Inter-brain neural coupling was analyzed across three relational layers: performer-performer (PP), performer-audience (PA), and audience-audience (AA) coupling. Behavioral ratings showed strong affective engagement and shared evaluative alignment. Neural coupling during live performance was not expressed as a diffuse increase across channel pairs, but was organized into task-sensitive relational components with interpretable PC-corr network modules. Crucially, path-based mediation analyses revealed that PA components statistically bridged PP coordination and AA coupling, yielding multiple complete and partial PP [->] PA [->] AA pathways. Brain-behavior analyses further suggested that mediation-related PA components were linked to shared performance evaluation and emotional alignment. These findings identify performer-audience coupling as a cross-role neural interface through which coordinated production becomes linked to shared collective reception. Significant StatementHow coordinated actions become shared experiences is a major problem in social neuroscience, yet most studies examine pairs of people. Using live music as a model of group interaction, we found that brain-to-brain alignment was organized across social roles rather than arising as a uniform response to the same event. Performer-audience alignment occupied a bridging position between coordination within the ensemble and integration within the audience. This identifies a systems-level architecture through which collective action may become linked to collective experience. The framework moves multi-brain research beyond dyads and offers a general approach for studying classrooms, public speaking, theater, rituals, and team events, where one group generates structured behavior that another group jointly receives and interprets.