More than 200,000 Spotify songs were analyzed to find differences and similarities in sleep music.
A new study found that music that helps people sleep has some common traits, like being quieter and slower than other music.
Popular Spotify sleep playlists, however, often include louder, more upbeat music.
These findings were published in PLOS ONE today, by Rebecca Jane Scarratt of Aarhus University, Denmark, and colleagues.
There are many individuals who claim that listening to music before bed helps them go to sleep, which raises the issue of whether or not music that is specifically picked for this reason has certain qualities that are universal.
However, there aren’t many studies on the subject, and the studies that have been done in the past have a tendency to be relatively small.
Scarratt and colleagues examined 225,626 songs from 985 Spotify playlists related to sleep in order to better understand the features of sleep music.
They compared the audio characteristics of the sleep recordings to audio characteristics of music from a dataset representing music generally using Spotify’s API.
This study found that compared to other types of music, sleep music is often slower and quieter. In addition, acoustic instruments predominate and there are seldom any lyrics.
Despite these patterns, however, the researchers found that sleep music had a lot of different musical features, which they put into six different sub-categories.
There are three types of music that fit the profile of sleep music, and one of them is ambient music.
The music in the other three genres, however, was louder and more energetic than typical sleep music.
Several well-known songs were included on these tracks, including “Dynamite” by BTS and “lovely (with Khalid)” by Billie Eilish and Khalid.
The authors think that the familiarity of popular songs could help some people relax and fall asleep, even though they have more energy.
However, further study is required to confirm this hypothesis and determine the many factors that influence individuals’ musical preferences before bed.
Overall, this research reveals that when it comes to the music individuals chose for sleep, there is no “one size fits all.” The results could be used to help make music-based strategies to help people sleep in the future.
“In this study,” as explained by the authors, “we investigated the characteristics of music used for sleep and found that even though sleep music, in general, is softer, slower, instrumental and more often played on acoustic instruments than other music, the music people use for sleep displays a large variation including music characterized by high energy and tempo.
“The study can both inform the clinical use of music and advance our understanding of how music is used to regulate human behavior in everyday life.”
Source: 10.1371/journal.pone.0278813
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