Three potentially unique acoustic characteristics of healing music that transcend genre identified

There are three potentially unique acoustic characteristics of healing music that transcend musical genres, suggests a study published in the open access journal. General psychiatry.

The findings could help personalize playlists for patients, using artificial intelligence to analyze individual physiological and psychological responses, and help evaluate the effectiveness of existing music therapies, the researchers suggest.

Despite evidence of music’s therapeutic effects on mental health issues, such as anxiety, depression and post-traumatic stress disorder, there is no consensus on what defines healing music, note Researchers.

So they wanted to know whether healing music shares certain acoustic characteristics, regardless of genre, and whether these characteristics are distinct from those found in regular music.

To build a healing music library, they relied on the recommendations of 35 therapists, all with several years of experience in practice and/or research in music therapy.

This produced a collection of 165 different pieces of music that the experts frequently used in their daily practice or believed to be helpful in addressing emotional and other mental health issues.

These were compared to 330 pieces of classical music written by 10 composers and played on 11 instruments; 50 pieces of traditional Chinese music with five elements; 100 Jazz recordings; and 300 recordings of emotional music from the Chinese Affective Music System (CAMS).

Traditional Chinese five-element music includes five different tones or pitches, each connecting to the liver, heart, spleen, lungs and kidneys, corresponding to the five elements of wood, fire, metal, earth and water.

The CAMS covers seven distinct emotional states: happiness; calm; sadness; fear; disgust; anger; and surprise. Each clip is accompanied by a set of indicator data, two of which were used in this study: valence, which describes the music’s ability to evoke feelings of happiness or sadness; and excitement.

The pieces included nine different genres: classical; electronic; rhythm and blues (R&B); film music (soundtrack); popular; Jazz; military (marching) music; New Age; and pop.

Classical music made up the largest proportion (28.5%) of recommendations, followed by pop music (18%). None of the remaining genres accounted for more than 15% of the total. Five participants nominated “Castle in the Sky” by Japanese musician Joe Hisaishi.

The researchers then used a specially designed tool (Mirtoolbox) to extract musical features from audio files for statistical analysis, segmentation and clustering.

This produced 370 acoustic characteristics grouped into five dimensions:

1. Energy, volume and volume
2. Rhythm (tempo and rhythm)
3. Stamp
4. Pitch (frequency and harmonic)
5. Key (tonal field).

About a quarter of these feature films (25.5%) were specifically associated with their genre, but the rest were shared across all genres.

To find out whether these commonalities contributed to the music’s healing properties, they were compared to healing pieces of classical music and traditional Chinese five-element music.

This showed that more than a quarter (26%+) of acoustic characteristics differed significantly between “healing” classical music pieces (47) and standard classical music pieces.

And there was strong evidence that all pieces of healing music and traditional Chinese music shared nearly 10% of their acoustic characteristics.

Based on this, three potentially distinctive acoustic features of healing music were identified, independent of genre, differing from ordinary music of the same genre, and consistent across different types of healing music.

These three features significantly predicted both subjective valence and arousal ratings in the CAMS.

These were the standard deviation (SD) of the roughness, the mean (mean), and the period entropy of the third coefficient of the Mel Frequency Cepstral Coefficients (MFCC3).

The standard deviation of roughness describes the extent to which the perceived irregularity or harshness of a sound deviates from the average; The MFCC captures the amount of energy in different frequency ranges, with mean referring to the average and period entropy referring to the randomness or predictability of frequency component patterns over time.

Given roughness’s ability to create different moods and emotional responses in listeners, it is an essential perceptual feature of music, the researchers say.

“For example, dissonant intervals in very rough-sounding music may evoke feelings of tension or suspense, while consonant intervals in softer-sounding music may evoke feelings of relaxation or resolution,” they explain. they.

The results were validated when the acoustic characteristics of jazz pieces from the Healing Music Collection were compared to those of regular jazz music.

And they echo previous research indicating that music is a universal language that transcends culture and genres, the researchers say. This includes traditional forms of music, such as pilgrimage songs in Nigeria, high-quality drumming in Ghana, singing bowl music in India, and music of the five elements in China.

They acknowledge that they relied on a relatively small number of experts to create their collection of healing music and that cultural factors may limit the broader applicability of their findings.

But they suggest that integrating the three acoustic features into music could allow healthcare professionals to personalize therapeutic playlists for patients, leveraging AI algorithms to analyze physiological and psychological responses in real time .

“The implications of these findings can be applied in various contexts, such as music therapy for stress reduction, mental health and chronic pain management,” they conclude.