Music has long been recognized for its therapeutic properties, but new research suggests that its ability to alleviate pain depends on one key factor: tempo.
A research team at McGill University in Montreal, Quebec, has discovered that pain relief occurs when music is played at a rhythm that aligns with a person’s natural tempo.
“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.
Roy and his team’s study explored how adjusting a song’s tempo to match a patient’s internal rhythm could enhance pain relief.
“One important finding in research on temporal dynamics of music is that people tend to sing or tap at a characteristic rate when asked to produce a simple melody,” Roy and his colleagues write in their paper. This rate that people tend to gravitate toward is known as their spontaneous production rate (SPR).
Although music has played a central role in culture and health practices for centuries, the McGill University team’s study differed from previous research “based on previous findings showing that relaxing music produces stronger hypoalgesic (or pain-reducing, you can use both terms interchangeably) effects,” Roy told The Debrief in an email.
Roy added that “based on the fact that slower tempos tend to be associated with more relaxation, we could have indeed predicted that the slowest tempos would have produced the strongest hypoalgesic effects.”
However, Roy and his colleagues said that tempos in the middle—those that are closest to what are known as an individual’s SPR—were the ones associated with the strongest hypoalgesic effects. Participants in the team’s study were not asked to evaluate the degree of relaxation music helped them achieve. Because of this, the team said they can’t be entirely certain whether slower tempos were truly more ‘relaxing,’ although it has certainly been implied in past research.
“So, we found that the slowest tempos, presumably the ones that should be the most relaxing, weren’t the ones that produced the strongest analgesic effects,” Roy said. “We think that this is because there was a ‘mismatch’ between the slowest tempos and the participants’ spontaneous production rate (SPR), which is the tempo that feels more ‘natural’ for participants.”
To test the hypothesis, researchers worked with 60 participants, exposing them to low levels of pain while monitoring their responses under different auditory conditions—either in silence or while listening to music. The participants, including both musicians and non-musicians, were given songs played at different tempos: one matching their natural rhythm and others adjusted to be slightly faster or slower.
To determine each participant’s natural tempo, researchers used the nursery rhyme Twinkle, Twinkle, Little Star. Participants tapped along to the melody on a touch-sensitive pad, which allowed researchers to capture their internal rhythm.
The experiment lasted 30 minutes, during which participants underwent 12 rounds of pain testing. A mild heat stimulus was intermittently applied to pads on their forearms for 10-second intervals, with breaks of varying lengths. They then rated their pain levels after each test.
Participants either endured the pain in silence or listened to a melody, selecting their preferred style and tempo or a version altered by 15 percent. According to Roy, the most intense discomfort participants described was comparable to briefly touching the outside of a hot coffee mug and pulling away.
“Music therapists who heard about our study and responded that this was important for their work with patients in pain,” Caroline Palmer, a researcher in McGill’s Department of Psychology, told The Debrief.
“Often, those patients are asked to bring their favorite songs to a therapy session, but the patients report that they no longer enjoy their favorite music when it is heard too often while they experience pain,” Palmer said. “The music therapists saw value in using novel (unfamiliar) music in therapy sessions and in that way, avoid reducing their patients’ enjoyment with preferred music.”
Looking ahead, this research could have implications for pain management strategies incorporating music therapy.
“We could envision calibrating the tempo of the music to the patients’ SPRs to potentiate the pain-relieving effects of music,” Roy said. “However, this would need to be tested in a follow-up study with patients with chronic pain first, or during painful medical procedures, to make sure that our findings generalize to clinical settings.”
Roy added that currently “there are no reasons to think that they wouldn’t. Note that music therapists already use this general principle; they know from experience that certain tempos may be too slow, but this hasn’t been tested scientifically in a controlled study yet. They also don’t have a procedure to measure SPRs.
“This could be something interesting to add if it proves to also be optimal in a clinical study with chronic pain (e.g., neuropathic pain, low back pain) or pain induced by a medical procedure,” Roy added.
The McGill University team’s study, “Individualizing musical tempo to spontaneous rates maximizes music-induced hypoalgesia,” was published in the journal PAIN.
Chrissy Newton is a PR professional and founder of VOCAB Communications. She hosts the Rebelliously Curious podcast, which can be found on The Debrief’s YouTube Channel. Follow her on X: @ChrissyNewton and at chrissynewton.com.