For many, music is the ultimate motivator. Our favorite songs get us off the couch and onto the crag or the trail. Athletes know music is a performance enhancer, and the science backs them up: Two years ago, at McMaster University, in Hamilton, Ontario, showed that subjects who listened to custom playlists were consistently able to generate more power during a 30-second interval than those who did not listen to music.
Neuroscientists have also long known that specific songs can actually cause chemical reactions in our brain that alter how we feel. Scientists at McGill University, in Montreal, who have spent nearly four decades studying music and the brain, that showed, in short, when we hear pleasurable music鈥攕pecifically, recognizable pitches and patterns鈥攐ur brain releases dopamine, the happiness neurotransmitter that responds to natural reward stimuli like exercise, food, and sex. And last year, Stefan Koelsch, a professor of music psychology at Freie University, in Berlin, and his colleagues expanded on previous studies suggesting that positive moods encouraged by music can maintain healthy physiological responses to stress. , published in the journal Nature Research, found that the release of cortisol among subjects listening to music heightened their abilities to react and overcome stressful situations.
鈥淢usic isn鈥檛 strictly necessary for survival,鈥 says Robert Zatorre, the 2013 study鈥檚 lead author and professor of neuroscience at McGill. 鈥淚f you don鈥檛 get any music, you won鈥檛 die.鈥 But Zatorre says this burgeoning field of research showing that music can naturally and profoundly alter the brain鈥檚 chemical makeup poses a massive question: Can doctors design playlists to serve as an adjunct or even an alternative medical treatment?
In 2013, this question spurred聽biologist Ketki Karanam, former head of product design at Nokia Marko Ahtisaari, and graduate Yadid Ayzenberg to lay the groundwork for the , a Boston-based company whose main goal is to develop music as precision medicine. For the past two years, Sync has been spearheading various studies that look at the connection between music and the mind. The company has collaborated with advisers from Berklee College of Music, MIT Media Lab, and Spotify to gather data on the therapeutic effects of music on large-scale populations. The ultimate goal is to help doctors treat patients suffering from pain and fatigue, among other ailments, via music instead of鈥攐r perhaps in conjunction with鈥攄rugs.
This burgeoning field of research poses a massive question: Can doctors design playlists to serve as an alternative to medical treatment?
鈥淢usic can modulate neural systems like the dopamine response, autonomic nervous system, and others that are related to stress, movement, learning, and memory,鈥 says Daphne Zohar, the CEO of parent biopharma company who joined the Sync team in 2015 and helped launch the project. 鈥淏ut we want to take this into the realm of clinical science.鈥
Recently, Sync has been collaborating with science advisers like Zatorre and musicians including six-time Grammy-winner Peter Gabriel, American singer-songwriter St. Vincent, and British classical pianist Jon Hopkins to embark on the first-ever large-scale study measuring how the structural properties of music鈥攊ncluding beat, key, and timbre鈥攁ffect our brain activity, heart rate, and sleep patterns. While Sync and its research are still in their infancy, project members envision themselves working toward discovering clinical applications to sharpen focus and treat anxiety, depression, post-traumatic stress, and even Alzheimer鈥檚 and Parkinson鈥檚, while providing pain management alternatives in light of the opioid-abuse epidemic in the United States, all by using music. Last December, crowd in California that she wondered about the day when medical professionals would tell patients, 鈥淭ake two of these songs and call me in the morning.鈥
And what songs would a patient be taking? It depends, says Karanam: 鈥淚n order to have the best effects on your mind and body, we鈥檒l need to personalize music to fit [a potential patient鈥檚] needs and tastes.鈥 Whether that鈥檚 tango, rap, or heavy metal, a combination of conscious and subconscious factors鈥攍ike personal taste, mood, the music that one grew up with鈥攃an influence how someone reacts to a song. One can even have positive, unexpected reactions to a song that they wouldn鈥檛 typically choose for their playlist, as a recent monthlong pseudo-experiment at Sync revealed. 鈥淲e have a colleague who said they didn鈥檛 like Justin Bieber,鈥 says Karanam. 鈥淏ut while he was listening to him, we looked at his monitor and his wrist device using electronominal activity, which measures the autonomic nervous system and tells us when you鈥檙e scared or excited. His heart rate picked up鈥攈e was emotionally engaged!鈥
While its clinical applications are still years away, Sync has been conducting preliminary lab research and launched a few large-scale projects marrying digital music services with wearable body monitors to collect self-reported data from listeners. For example, Sync recently began tracking listeners鈥 moods, blood pressure, and sleeping habits via wearable devices like Fitbit to identify patterns in the connections between music, emotions, and cognitive performance. To this end, Sync has already analyzed more than 10 million publicly available playlists tagged with health-related terms, such as 鈥渞elaxation,鈥 and earlier this year launched , a smartphone app that offers algorithmically generated music meant to relax a user before sleeping. The company also created the , a first-of-its-kind app that delivers daily playlists through Slack鈥檚 real-time messaging system, and is testing the effectiveness of specifically engineered music for people trying to relax or work. Founders and investors plan to incorporate biometric feedback loops into these programs to gather self-reported heart rate and heart rate variabilities to best understand how physiology correlates to music.
The ultimate goal is to help doctors treat patients suffering from pain and fatigue via music instead of鈥攐r perhaps in conjunction with鈥攄rugs.
鈥淔or the first time, we are trying to understand the emotional state of listeners as they listen to music,鈥 says Tristan Johan, a principal scientist at Spotify and co-founder of the , a research company that aggregates, analyzes, and shares musical data from the web. Johan joined Sync as a musical adviser to help the engineer and science crew analyze musical information and system designs. 鈥淭he data, when measured by sensors and under normal listening conditions (at home, at work, etc), is not biased, and we can capture orders of magnitude more of it than in a lab,鈥 says Johan. 鈥淭he hope is to find the music that is best for you in any given situation or condition, in particular where music can have an positive effect on your health.鈥
Project members plan to use the data gathered in these preliminary projects ultimately to better understand how effective music can be鈥攁nd hopefully will be鈥攆or medical treatment. Karanam says the company hopes to publish its first research findings one or two years from now. And so Karanam鈥檚 question remains: Could we one day harness the personalized therapeutic effects of music?
鈥淲e could use music to enhance a lot of people鈥檚 lives,鈥 says Zatorre. 鈥淚magine if we could help depressed people get 10 percent better without any drugs? These would have huge societal impacts. Even a small improvement is meaningful.鈥