People often listen to music to relieve stress. The key is choosing the right music for the time of day or night, and the desired effects. The present meta-analytic study includes all randomized controlled trials (RCTs) on the effects of music interventions on stress-related outcomes in adults, who are not suffering from dementia, that have been published.
The participants' overall anxiety dropped by 65 percent as they listened to one particular song: Weightless” by Marconi Union As it turns out, the song was created in collaboration with sound therapists who carefully arranged the harmonies, rhythms, and bass lines to help slow a listener's heart rate, reduce blood pressure, and lower the stress-hormone cortisol.
Many studies on the effects of music considered state anxiety to be a stress-related emotional state, examining relationships between state anxiety outcomes and physiological stress-related outcomes (e.g., Hook stress relief et al., 2008 ; Koelsch, Fuermetz, et al., 2011a ; Ng et al., 2016 ; Zhang et al., 2014 ). Although the terms state anxiety and stress are used interchangeably in the psychology literature, different self-reporting questionnaires are used.
In contrast to many of the other apps that claim effectiveness, Brainwaves was created with the use of human expertise and is not the output of some clever black-box artificial intelligence that just produces some ethereal soundscape for the listener to take a sonic bath in. What I was really impressed with in this project was that the art and the science were able to exist independently of one another and really respect the other's space.
Nature Sounds - Very simple, nature sounds from different places can be used to meditate, this is one of the more known forms of music during meditation and provides an effective calming outcome. In a 2013 study, people given the opioid blocking drug Naltrexone experienced less pleasure while listening to their favorite song, suggesting music activates the release of pain-relieving opioids.
We hypothesized that those participants who listened to relaxing music prior to the stress task would show a different stress responses in terms of cortisol, salivary alpha-amylase, heart rate, respiratory sinus arrhythmia, subjective perception of stress, and anxiety when compared to non-music control groups, i.e. an acoustic control condition (sound of rippling water) and a control condition resting without acoustic stimulation.