Recent research published in the journal General Psychiatry has unveiled three unique acoustic features common to healing music across various genres.
This breakthrough discovery could significantly impact the personalization of music therapy and the evaluation of its effectiveness in treating mental health issues like anxiety, depression, and post-traumatic stress disorder.
To identify these features, researchers drew upon the expertise of 35 music therapists with years of experience in the field.
They compiled a diverse library of 165 pieces of music frequently used in therapeutic practices or considered beneficial for emotional and mental health.
This collection was compared against a wide range of music, including 330 classical pieces, 50 traditional five-element Chinese music pieces, 100 Jazz recordings, and 300 tracks from the Chinese affective music system (CAMS).
The study utilized Mirtoolbox, a tool designed for extracting musical features from audio files.
This analysis identified 370 acoustic features, which were grouped into five dimensions: energy, rhythm, timbre, pitch, and key. Surprisingly, only about one-fourth of these features were genre-specific, while the rest were common across all genres.
By comparing these commonalities with the healing pieces from classical and traditional Chinese music, the researchers found significant differences in over a quarter of the acoustic features.
They also discovered that nearly 10% of these features were shared between all healing music pieces and traditional Chinese music.
Three distinctive acoustic features of healing music emerged from the analysis, transcending genre boundaries and differing from regular music: the standard deviation of roughness, mean of the third coefficient of the mel-frequency cepstral coefficients (MFCC3), and the period entropy of MFCC3.
These features relate to the perceived irregularity or harshness of a sound, the energy distribution across different frequency ranges, and the randomness in patterns of frequency components over time, respectively.
The significance of roughness in evoking moods and emotional responses is particularly noted. For example, dissonant intervals with high roughness can induce feelings of tension or suspense, whereas smoother, consonant intervals are associated with relaxation or resolution.
Validation of these findings was achieved by comparing the acoustic features of jazz pieces in the healing music collection with regular jazz music.
The results suggest that music’s therapeutic potential may be a universal phenomenon, transcending cultural and genre boundaries.
The researchers acknowledge limitations, such as the small number of experts consulted and potential cultural biases.
However, they propose that incorporating these three acoustic features into music could enable healthcare professionals to use AI algorithms to create personalized therapeutic playlists for patients, catering to their specific physiological and psychological responses.
This study offers promising implications for diverse applications, including stress reduction, mental health, and chronic pain management through music therapy.
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The research findings can be found in General Psychiatry.
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