Interpersonal neural synchrony in joint music-making and conversation: toward an integrative Marr-level account

Joint music-making and conversation are two fundamental forms of human interaction. A growing number of hyperscanning studies have examined interpersonal neural synchrony (INS) in music and language separately, yet few have sought to connect findings across these domains or interpret them within a unified theoretical framework. Recent reviews have underscored the need for systematic approaches that move beyond isolated reports of brain regions or oscillatory patterns. This article answers that call by applying David Marr’s tripartite framework—computational, algorithmic, and implementational—to INS observed during dyadic interaction in musical and conversational contexts. The aim is to move from descriptive to mechanistic accounts of synchrony.The article introduces INS as a domain-general mechanism supporting social coordination, situates it within the rise of hyperscanning in social neuroscience, and explains how Marr’s framework bridges music and language interaction. To minimize interpretive pitfalls, it discusses methodological caveats specific to hyperscanning and emphasizes the need to distinguish intra-individual from truly interaction-specific processes. The review then synthesizes evidence from musical interaction, including dynamic synchrony, task manipulations, and sensorimotor coupling, followed by findings from conversational studies. Overlapping neural networks are mapped across domains, and Marr’s framework is used to interpret these shared systems in terms of the problems they solve, the processes they instantiate, and their neural realizations summarized in a comparative table. The final section outlines future directions and testable hypotheses concerning role asymmetry, mutual adaptation, and dynamic reconfiguration.