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 this week 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.
"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.
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 a melody they had selected at their preferred tempo, 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 paper
"Individualizing musical tempo to spontaneous rates maximizes music-induced hypoalgesia" by Wenbo Yi, Caroline Palmer, Angela Seria, and Mathieu Roy was published in Pain
DOI: 10.1097/j.pain.0000000000003513
Funding
The research was funded by the Natural Sciences and Engineering Research Council of Canada, Canada Research Chair and the Canadian Institutes of Health Research.
