On Resonance in a Shared Room

Resonance at a distance, a concert experiment, and what presence adds

In 2026, a research team asked a simple question: does it matter whether musicians are actually in the room, or whether we listen to the same music through a screen? The same music, once played live in the hall, once delivered as a broadcast. The result, published in Scientific Reports, was clear: the physical presence of the musicians produced stronger emotional and bodily responses in listeners than the stream.

One could conclude that resonance requires nearness. But it is not that simple, and I would not want to make it so. There are too many experiences that point elsewhere. Sound healing, by many accounts, has its effect even across distance; people feel connected to someone they are thinking of, though that person is far away. Such experiences are not easily set aside.

Physics, too, invites caution. Experiments testing Bell's theorem have shown that two particles, once connected, remain related to one another however far apart they are moved — physicists call it nonlocality. Whether anything similar holds for the connection between people is not established; but it is enough to make me careful with the word "impossible." Connection, it seems, is not in every case bound to physical proximity.

And yet something stands out — and here the study and my own experience agree. However much resonance may arise across distance, in a shared room it seems to deepen. The effect becomes fuller, more immediate, more reliable. It is as if more paths arrive at once: the vibration carries through the air, we see one another, we share the same moment, the same silence. None of this rules out distance. But it adds something.

Perhaps that is the most honest way to put it: resonance is not bound to distance, yet nearness strengthens it. The one does not contradict the other.

For work with sound and voice, this means that much is possible across distance, and I do not exclude it. But the deepest of it I meet, again and again, where people share the same room, the same air, the same moment. So I hold to meeting in the body — not because nothing reaches across distance, but because the shared room adds something that is hard to put into words and harder still to transmit.

Some things can be explained. Resonance is felt most fully when it is shared.