RESEARCH
How does music affect people at a party?
What research has found about music and how people behave at events, and the popular claims the research doesn't support.
- The volume of the music has a lot to do with how easily guests can talk, and crowds tend to move together most on songs they know.
- People seem to move more when the musicians are in the same space, and to feel more connected to each other.
- Several popular claims about music, like the idea that going to gigs adds years to your life, fall apart when you check where they came from.
Pretty much every party has music playing. Usually it’s a playlist somebody put together or whatever the venue already had on, and nobody picked it for what it might do to the guests. There’s a longer essay on how every party already has a soundtrack if you’re curious, and here’s a quick tour of what researchers have found so far.
What the research has found #
The volume of the music has a lot to do with who can talk to whom. Two people at arm’s length can keep a conversation going with up to about 71 decibels of sound around them, and one large banquet, measured in three halls, ran at 83 to 87 decibels, well past that. Learn more about how loud background music should be.
On the dance floor, crowds seem to move together most on songs they know, at tempos near walking pace. At one concert, bass too low for people to hear made them move about 12% more. Find out more about how to get people to dance at a wedding.
A guest’s age makes a difference too. The songs people have the most memories of are usually from their teens, and younger guests also respond to their parents’ music. Check out our post on party music for all ages for what that means for a song list.
In the few studies there are, people moved more when the music was live, and the audience felt more connected to each other. Read more about whether live music is better than recorded.
In lab studies, music seems to speed up drinking compared with silence. The famous finding that louder music means more drinking rests on one small study from a lab whose work is in question. Learn more about whether loud music makes people drink more.
Memory care and sound baths #
In one study, residents with dementia were positively engaged 69% of the time during live music, 25% with recorded music and 12.5% in silence. Learn more about live music for memory care residents, including what it hasn’t been shown to do.
People report feeling calmer after a sound bath, and the evidence for any health claim is thin. Find out more about whether sound baths work.
Claims we checked and dropped #
You’ll hear these a lot, but when we looked into them, the evidence didn’t back them up.
| The claim | What we found |
|---|---|
| Your favorite music is from when you were 23. | Three later studies put the peak at 14 to 17. |
| Going to a gig every two weeks adds nine years to your life. | It came from a marketing study paid for by a venue company, and it was never published as research. |
| Music reduces agitation in dementia. | The Cochrane review, which covered 30 trials in its 2025 update, found no effect on agitation. |
| Slow music makes diners spend more. | A 2024 experiment across 282 restaurant tables found slow music kept diners about 23 minutes longer (80 minutes against 57), and the bill was the same. |
| Making music together makes children kinder. | When researchers repeated the best-known study in kindergartens in 2021, they found no effect. |
How we read the research #
For every claim we write about, we say what was found, how big the effect was, who was studied and where, and what the catch is (one night, a small group, no comparison group). Some findings rest on many studies and some rest on one small one, and we think you should know which is which before you plan around them.
As far as we can tell, some questions haven’t been studied at all. Nobody has measured music at a charity auction, compared an acoustic act with an amplified one, or counted how much strangers talk at a party with and without music. When a question like that comes up, we’ll tell you the research isn’t there yet.
Choosing music for your event #
If you’d like to plan the music with some of this in mind, we’re glad to help. Take a look at the solo players, duos and full dance bands we book.
Sources
- Rindel, J. H. (2019). Restaurant acoustics: verbal communication in eating establishments. Acoustics in Practice. Read the source
- Kopiez, R., Weigang, J., Platz, F., and Düvel, N. (2021). Farewell to Holbrook & Schindler's (1989) "song-specific age"? Music & Science. Read the source
- van der Steen, J. T., and others (2025). Music-based therapeutic interventions for people with dementia. Cochrane Database of Systematic Reviews. Read the source
- Malcman, M., Azar, O. H., Shavit, T., and Rosenboim, M. (2024). How does background music affect dining duration, tips and bill amounts in restaurants? A field experiment. Behavioral Sciences. Read the source
- Baier, J., Wöllner, C., and Wolf, A. (2021). Interpersonal musical synchronization and prosocial behavior in children: no effects in a controlled field experiment. Frontiers in Psychology. Read the source
