I’ve written several blog posts and devoted a chapter in mylatest book to music and pain. A study just published in Pain promptedme to revisit this topic.
Music can reduce pain, and it does not seem to matter whetherthe music is happy or sad. In one study, both happy and sad melodies reducedheat pain in healthy volunteers, while listening to a lecture did not. Inanother, pleasant music helped, but unpleasant music did not. Children withmigraines who listened to music improved as much as those who took butterburextract (an effective herbal remedy for migraines), and both groups did betterthan controls. Older adults with osteoarthritis benefited from listening tomusic for 20 minutes a day compared with sitting quietly for the same amount oftime.
Researchers at McGill University have been studying which musicalqualities contribute to pain relief. They classify music along threedimensions: arousal, valence, and depth. Arousal describes how intense orforceful the music sounds. Valence refers to how happy or joyful it feels.Depth describes qualities such as emotional richness, complexity, andthoughtfulness. Their previous research, also published in Pain,suggested that arousal and depth mattered more for pain relief than howcheerful the music was.
Tempo also appears to matter. Music adjusted to a person’snatural rhythm, the pace at which they spontaneously hum or tap out a tune,provided more relief than faster or slower versions.
In this new study published in Pain, the McGill grouptested unfamiliar musical excerpts in two experiments involving 134participants exposed to experimental heat pain. The researchers selected theexcerpts using a validated model of arousal, valence, and depth. Intense,forceful music increased pain, while music rated as having greater depthreduced it.
Their analysis suggested that these effects were explainedby how pleasant participants found the music. Music with greater depth tendedto be more enjoyable and was associated with less pain. More forceful musictended to be less enjoyable and was associated with more pain. The music'squalities appeared to matter mainly because they influenced the listener’senjoyment.
The researchers propose that music’s effect on pain involvesthe brain’s reward system. The pleasure of listening to music may be moreimportant than any particular feature of the sound. This is a possibleexplanation, but not proof of how music relieves pain.
The practical advice is to choose music you enjoy, ratherthan music that is labeled relaxing or therapeutic. Listening to music you loveis a reasonable thing to try. Unfortunately, some migraine sufferers areexquisitely sensitive to sounds during an attack, and even pleasant music isdifficult to hear.
