When Musicians Lock In: Coupled Oscillators and the Physics of Ensemble Synchronisation
Every ensemble faces the same physical problem: N oscillators with slightly different natural frequencies trying to synchronise through a shared coupling channel. The Kuramoto model — developed by a statistical physicist to describe fireflies, neurons, and power grids — applies directly to musicians. It predicts a phase transition between incoherence and synchrony, quantifies why latency destroys networked ensemble performance, and connects to recent EEG studies of inter-brain synchronisation.