According to a McGill University research team, music has the best chance of providing pain relief when it is played at our natural rhythm.

The team’s work suggests it may be possible to reduce a patient’s pain level by using technology to adjust the tempo of a favourite piece of music to match the patient’s internal rhythm.

The discovery was the subject of a paper recently published in Pain, the top journal in the field of pain medicine and research.

Music has been used to alleviate pain for centuries, but there has been increasing scientific interest in using it to treat medical conditions in recent years. From Parkinson’s disease to strokes to chronic pain, scientists are fascinated with the possibilities of applying this treatment to manage symptoms. But right now, little is known about how it works.

“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.

“In the past, it has often been suggested that soothing or relaxing music works best as a pain reliever,” added 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 music’s capacity to reduce pain.”

Over the past decade, research has shown that whether we speak, sing or play an instrument, or even 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’s called our spontaneous production rate, and it may be tied to our circadian rhythm.

“It is possible that the neural oscillations that are responsible for driving our preferred rhythm at a particular rate are more easily pulled along when a musical tempo is closer to our own natural rhythm,” added Roy. “As a result, they are pulled away from the neural frequencies associated with pain.”

To find out whether listening to music at an individual’s natural rhythm helped lower their experience of pain, the McGill researchers examined the pain ratings of 60 participants (a mixture of musicians and non-musicians) subjected to low levels of pain in different scenarios. Participants were assessed in silence, as well as while listening to a manipulated music track. Sometimes, the track had a tempo matched to the individual’s natural rhythm and sometimes it was slightly faster or slower.

Each participant’s natural rhythm was established when they tapped out the tempo of a well-known nursery rhyme (“Twinkle, Twinkle, Little Star”) at the rate that was most comfortable for them. They tapped on a touch-sensitive pad that produced the next tone in the sequence of the melody in response to their input, thus capturing each participant’s natural rhythm.

Over the course of 30 minutes, participants underwent 12 blocks of tests. During the tests, various levels of heat were applied to small pads on their forearms for 10-second blocks. The heated periods were interspersed with pauses of varying lengths. Participants either experienced the pain in silence or listened to an unfamiliar melody in a style they had chosen. If listening to music, it was either at their preferred tempo, 15% faster or 15% slower. After each block of tests, participants were asked to rate their pain level. According to Roy, the worst pain was like what you feel when you touch the outside of a coffee mug and pull your hand away quickly because it’s too hot.

The researchers found that, compared to silence, music of whatever kind and at whatever tempo significantly reduced the severity of participants’ perceptions of pain. More importantly, the McGill team discovered that the greatest reductions in the pain level ratings 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.

This article was adapted and published with permission from McGill University.