The analgesic effects of music are felt all the more when we listen to a song we like, whatever its musical genre. — AFP
Science is increasingly focusing on the benefits of music, particularly when it comes to pain management.
Indeed, music has been shown to have hypoalgesic effects, decreasing sensitivity to painful stimuli. And this holds true regardless of the genre of music listened to, according to a Dutch study published in the journal Scientific Reports.
A research team from the Erasmus Medical Centre came to this conclusion after conducting an experiment at Lowlands, a music festival held near Biddinghuizen in the Netherlands.
Over 500 festival-goers were selected to take part in an experiment in which they were subjected to pain that had no effect on their health.
They had to immerse their hands in a basin of very cold water, at a temperature of between zero and four degrees Celsius, while listening to 45-second musical extracts.
The songs were from different musical genres (pop, rock, classical, electronic, etc). They were all tracks by artistes who were performing at the Lowlands festival, to increase the likelihood that they would be known to the volunteers, the researchers explain in their paper.
At the end of the experiment, participants were asked to fill out a questionnaire designed to assess the pain they had felt according to the music they were listening to.
As it turned out, no musical genre stood out from the others. In other words, pop music had no greater pain-relieving effect than rock or classical music.
On the other hand, the scientists did find that the volunteers rated the pain as less intense when they listened to a song they were familiar with, and especially one they liked.
“When participants listened to a genre that matched their pre-reported genre preferences, their pain tolerance was higher,” the researchers explain.
These findings support what Canadian academics demonstrated in separate research, published in 2023 in the journal Frontiers In Pain Research. They found that the pain-relieving benefits of music can be maximised when we listen to our favourite songs, whatever their musical genre. The researchers hypothesise that this phenomenon may be due to the release of dopamine (the famous pleasure hormone), as music can have a mood-enhancing effect on the brain. – AFP Relaxnews
