PainRelief.com: What are the main findings?
Response: To test this hypothesis, we first measured participants’ SPRs by asking them to produce simple melodies at their preferred pace and calculating each person’s tempo. We then modified musical excerpts to match their exact spontaneous production rate or to be 15% faster or slower. While participants listened to these different versions, we administered painful thermal stimulations—comparable to briefly holding a very hot cup of coffee—and asked them to rate their pain on a 0 to 100 scale. The results showed that pain ratings were significantly lower when music was presented at a participant’s SPR compared to the faster or slower tempos.
PainRelief.com: What should readers take away from your report?
Response: Our results suggest that neither slow nor fast tempos are inherently better for pain relief. Instead, the effectiveness of music in reducing pain depends on its alignment with an individual’s spontaneous production rate.
These findings are grounded in extensive research on the temporal dynamics of music processing, suggesting that scientific understanding of music processing can be harnessed for therapeutic purposes.
PainRelief.com: What recommendations do you have for future research as a result of this study?
Response: This study opens up two key avenues for future research:
- Clinical Applications
- Further studies should explore whether the pain-reducing effects of SPR-calibrated music extend to clinical settings, particularly among individuals with chronic pain.
- If validated, these findings could lead to practical applications, such as measuring patients’ SPRs and tailoring therapeutic music accordingly. Given the simplicity of this approach and its lack of side effects, even modest improvements in pain management would be valuable.
- Music therapists often search for ways to use unfamiliar or novel music with patients, who can lose interest in their favorite music when used in painful therapies. By relying on novel music, this research offers a way to avoid interfering with patients’ favorite music.
- Mechanistic Investigations
- Future research should examine why SPR-matched music is optimal. One hypothesis is that it facilitates entrainment of neural oscillations, a process that has been tested using electroencephalography (EEG) during music performance, and now can be extended to pain perception as well as to other brain-imaging techniques.
More generally, the same approach could be used to test the impact of other features of music, such as tonality, harmony, timbre, etc. An important takeaway from this study is that it is possible to scientifically test the contribution of each of these parameters of music so as to enhance the effects of music on pain.
Citation: “Individualizing musical tempo to spontaneous rates maximizes music-induced hypoalgesia” by Wenbo Yi, Caroline Palmer, Angela Seria, and Mathieu Roy was published in Pain
DOI: 10.1097/j.pain.0000000000003513
Funding
The research was funded by the Natural Sciences and Engineering Research Council of Canada, Canada Research Chair and the Canadian Institutes of Health Research.
More information:
American Music Therapy Association
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Last Updated on February 7, 2025 by PainRelief.com