Can Your Favourite Music Reduce Pain?
Looking at the science behind the story
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Music is a wonderful thing. There’s something inherently human in our shared love of sound. Whether it be Chopin or the latest Olivia Rodrigo song, there’s a deep sense of connection that we can only achieve when listening to a piece of music that we all love.
And, according to recent headlines, music can also treat pain as effectively as common painkillers like Advil.
If true, this would be, if not huge, at least quite meaningful. Obviously it’s not possible to listen to music in every situation in which you might be in pain, but if music was such an effective treatment for pain it would be an incredibly useful tool in our arsenal, not least because pain is generally very hard to treat.
As someone who experiences chronic pain, I personally found the stories to be very interesting - this could be directly impactful for my life! Unfortunately, this new study doesn’t show that music is helpful for pain. At best, it just shows that when people listen to their favourite song they are a bit happier than when they listen to nothing at all.
The Science
The study in question is a new paper published in the journal Frontiers in Pain Research. In the paper, researchers took a group of 63 mostly university students, and gave them a mild pain stimulus which was described as similar to holding a “hot cup of coffee against the skin”. While doing so, these people listened to four different things - either their favourite track that they picked themselves, a random soothing piece of music, a garbled soundtrack of noise, or nothing at all. People then rated their pain intensity and unpleasantness on a scale from 0-100, as well as giving some ratings of how happy the sound they were listening to made them.
The results were, frankly, quite uninspiring as far as medical treatments go. There were no differences between the control group and either the soothing music or garbled noise group on pain intensity or unpleasantness. However, there was a fairly large reduction in self-reported pain for those people who were listening to their favourite tune while the pain sensation was being applied.
There were also some relatively vague results relating to how people felt about music, and whether their perception of the sound was related to how much pain they felt, but this was much less concrete. There’s some evidence in the paper that the type of emotion the music evokes might influence the pain reduction observed, but it’s quite complex to untangle that relationship with such a small sample.
What can we say about these results? Well, firstly, the authors didn’t compare music to any drugs or really anything except random noise and silence, so you can’t say anything whatsoever about Advil or the like. Those headlines were complete nonsense.
More broadly, the paper showed a complex relationship between music and pain. Random soothing music had no impact on pain ratings at all, despite the decrease seen when people listened to their top track.
It’s quite hard to interpret the impact of listening to your favourite song on pain for two very important reasons:
Pain is inherently subjective. There is no way to separate the subjective reporting of how much pain someone is in from their physiological experience of that pain.
You can’t blind people to what they are listening to. They know when they’re listening to their favourite song, and when it’s just random sounds.
Together, these present a very important source of bias. It’s hard to separate the potential impact that a specific tune might have on the pain someone is feeling from the pain that they are reporting. In other words, it might just be that people report a lower rate of pain when their top track comes on, even though they are still experiencing the same level of pain.
Personally, I think this explanation is quite likely, simply because soothing music had no effect at all, even though it did have an emotional impact. If music itself had some sort of beneficial effect related to emotions, then you’d expect random relaxation tracks to do something, even if it wasn’t as big as that seen for people’s favourite music.
Bottom Line
What does this mean for your pain?
Well, firstly, music is an entirely harmless intervention (as long as you don’t listen to it too loudly - be careful with your ears!), so if you find that it helps with pain management that’s obviously a good thing.
More broadly, there is some evidence that music can help with pain, but most of it suffers from similar biases as this study. It is really hard to blind the people assessing pain to the fact that there is music playing, especially when that’s usually the person listening to the music anyway. It’s hard to know if music reduces people’s actual perception of pain, or if it just makes them more likely to report slightly lower levels of pain regardless of what they’re actually feeling.
Overall, I’d say that the evidence for music improving pain is not terrible, but it’s not great either, and this study doesn’t add much to what we know already. It’s really hard to know if music is actually beneficial for pain, or if the effects we see are just biases in study design that people really wish were proof of something.
Listening to your favourite track is definitely enjoyable. The evidence that it helps with pain, however, is not very good.