When Using Music to Alleviate Pain, Tempo Matters

The AHA! Team — Mon, 31 Mar 2025 05:37:38 +0000

McGill University via EurekAlert! – We each have a natural rhythm, and music that matches it offers the best pain relief, McGill research suggests. Music has the best chance of providing pain relief when it is played at our natural rhythm, a McGill University research team has discovered. This suggests it may be possible to reduce a patient’s level of pain by using technology to take a piece of music someone likes and adjust the tempo to match their internal rhythm, the researchers said. The discovery was the subject of a paper published recently in Pain, the top journal in the field of pain medicine and research. Exploring which aspect of music lessens pain Music has been used to alleviate pain for centuries. In recent years, there has been increasing scientific interest in using music to treat medical conditions ranging from Parkinson’s disease to strokes and chronic pain. But little is known about how this might work. “There have been very few studies that really look at specific parameters of music to try to understand the effects of music on the brain,” explained Mathieu Roy, an associate professor in the Department of Psychology at McGill and the co-senior author of the paper. It has often been suggested that soothing or relaxing music works best as a pain reliever “In the past, it has often been suggested that soothing or relaxing music works best as a pain reliever,” added co-author Caroline Palmer, a Distinguished James McGill Professor in the Cognitive Neuroscience of Performance in the Department of Psychology and co-senior author of the paper. “But this didn’t seem precise enough. So, we set out to investigate whether the tempo — the rate at which a passage is produced and one of music’s core elements — could influence its capacity to reduce pain.” Our own internal beat may distract us from pain Research over the past decade has shown that whether we speak, sing, play an instrument or just tap along to music, we each have our own characteristic rhythm: the one to which we are most attuned and can produce most comfortably. It is thought that this rhythm, known as our spontaneous production rate (SPR), may be tied to our circadian rhythms. “It is possible that the neural oscillations that are responsible for driving our preferred tempo at a particular rate are more easily pulled along when a musical tempo is closer to our own natural tempo,” added Roy. “As a result, they are pulled away from the neural frequencies associated with pain.” The right beat reduces level of pain To find out whether listening to music at an individual’s natural tempo helped lower their experience of pain, the McGill researchers compared the pain ratings of 60 participants (some of whom were musicians and others not) as they were subjected to low levels of pain, either in silence or while listening to music that had been manipulated so that its tempo either matched the one that was most natural to each person or was slightly faster or slower. Each participant’s natural tempo was established by their tapping out the rhythm of a well-known nursery rhyme (Twinkle, Twinkle, Little Star) at the rate that was comfortable for them. The touch-sensitive pad they tapped on produced the next tone in the sequence of the melody, thus capturing their natural tempo. Participants underwent 12 blocks of tests in which 10 seconds of heat at various levels was applied intermittently to small pads on their forearms Over the course of 30 minutes, participants underwent 12 blocks of tests in which 10 seconds of heat at various levels was applied intermittently to small pads on their forearms, interspersed with pauses of varying lengths. Participants either experienced the pain in silence or listened to an unfamiliar melody in a style they had selected at their preferred tempo, or at 15 per cent faster or 15 per cent slower. After each block of tests, they were asked to rate their level of pain. At worst, according to Roy, the pain was like what you feel when you touch the outside of a hot coffee mug and pull your hand away quickly because it’s too hot. The right beat reduces pain the most The researchers found that, compared to silence, music of whatever kind and at whatever tempo significantly reduced participants’ perceptions of pain. More important, they discovered the greatest reductions in the ratings of the levels of pain occurred when the melodies were played at a rate that matched the participant’s own preferred tempo. As a next step, the researchers said they would like to use electroencephalography to measure neural activity and confirm that the rate of neuronal firing synchronizes with the external tempo of the music. They also indicated that they hope to test their findings with people living with chronic pain or pain associated with medical procedures. The research was funded by the Natural Sciences and Engineering Research Council of Canada, Canada Research Chair and the Canadian Institutes of Health Research. Journal Pain DOI 10.1097/j.pain.0000000000003513 To read the original article click here.

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Research Shows Music Aids Memory Performance in Older Adults and Patients With Alzheimer’s Disease

AHA Publisher — Sun, 29 Sep 2019 07:00:39 +0000

Texas State University via News Wise – For this year’s World Alzheimers Day, Dr. Deason from Texas State University, reflects on how aging and disease affects the human mind, particularly in older adults. For this year’s World Alzheimers Day, Dr. Deason from Texas State University, reflects on how aging and disease affects the human mind, particularly in older adults. Who: Dr. Rebecca Deason, Associate Professor of Psychology at Texas State, investigates how we learn and remember items and how memory is changed by aging and disease. Dr. Deason has researched memory of words, pictures, and music in young adults, healthy, older adults, and patients with Alzheimer’s Disease (AD) to find ways to enhance and maintain cognition throughout the lifespan. Dr. Deason believes changes in cognition with age is an important issue as the population itself ages. Interventions to increase the chances of healthy aging or to improve the lives of those suffering from age-related diseases such as AD are desirable and currently a focus of much scientific work. Currently, Dr. Deason operates a Memory and Cognition lab where her students and herself study younger and older participants on computer/laptop-based experiments and additionally run young adult participants in EEG/ERP studies. The ERP studies involve recording electrical activity as measured on the scalp- to make inferences about cognitive processes. In addition, music and memory is another area of focus for her research. Dr. Deason says music may aid memory performance in older adults and patients with AD, and her research has been some of the first to explore the possibilities and limitations of musical mnemonics. Patients with AD showed increase recognition memory for lyrics that had been sung compared to spoken music. Recently, Dr. Deason found intact implicit memory for musical stimuli in patients and says further investigation of how and why musical mnemonics work is critical for successfully using music to improve memory performance throughout the lifespan. Dr. Deason’s work centers on finding solutions to improve the daily lives of older adults and patients with Alzheimer’s disease. To read the original article click here.

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When Using Music to Alleviate Pain, Tempo Matters

Research Shows Music Aids Memory Performance in Older Adults and Patients With Alzheimer’s Disease