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.
The research team from the Erasmus Medical Center 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 this 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 0-4°C, while listening to 45-second musical extracts.
The songs were from different musical genres (pop, rock, classical, electronic, and so on), by artistes who were performing at the Lowlands festival, to increase the likelihood that they would be known to the volunteers. At the end of the experiment, the participants were asked to fill out a questionnaire designed to assess the pain they had felt in relation 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 preferences, their pain tolerance was higher,” the researchers noted.
These findings support what Canadian academics demonstrated in separate research, published last year in the journal Frontiers in Pain Research: 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 owing to the release of dopamine – the pleasure hormone – thanks to the mood-enhancing effects of music on the brain.