Following up on last week’s post about meditation, today’s post will go into more detail about using sound as part of our meditation practice. I get asked a lot of questions about using music and sound effects, and I’ll address the most common ones today.
The first question is: should I use any sound (e.g. music) or not? One study [1] found that music made no significant difference to mindfulness effectiveness; the meditation was no better or worse when people listened to music. Although one small study does not give us a definitive answer, we can nevertheless use these results to conclude that using music comes down to personal choice, and will probably not make your practice any better or worse.
The next question is what kind of sound? This is more complicated, as everybody has different tastes. I’ve meditated to ACDC and to a one chord relaxation track, and my relaxation levels depend on my mood at the time. Be that as it may, a study [2] compared the effects of 3 different sound conditions experienced before taking part in a stressful task:
- Choral music
- The sound of rippling water
- Rest without acoustic stimulation
The ‘choral music’ was ‘Miserere’ by Allegri. Before considering the results, we must bear in mind that one song is not going to be to everybody’s taste (although, to be fair, the researchers did take time to check participants’ musical tastes).
The study found that listening to music before carrying out a stress-inducing and mental arithmetic task did not create any significant psychological effects between the three groups. Even more surprisingly, the research found higher levels of the stress hormone cortisol in the music group, which indicates that they remained stressed for longer than the other groups. The rippling water group showed the lowest cortisol levels. However, the researchers did cite numerous other studies (e.g. [3]) that found the opposite; that music was associated with lower cortisol concentrations, as well as lower pain and anxiety.
I will return to this discussion every so often, as there is a lot more to think about than there is room for in today’s blog. For now, we have seen how complex this area is, we have seen research findings that argue the case for and against using sounds, we have seen that the type of sound (e.g. music or sound effects) seems to affect our responses.
You’re hopefully ready to think about this critically and experiment with different sounds (or no sounds at all) to choose the ones that work best for you. For me, especially having seen such a diversity of research findings, this is definitely one area to which the process of ‘learning by doing’ applies. Happy meditating!
References
- ‘Effect of Music on a Mindfulness Experience: An Online Study’ https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/S0197455621000721 [Accessed 31st January 2022]
2. ‘The Effect of Music on the Human Stress Response’ https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC3734071/ [Accessed 31st January 2022]
3. ‘Music Therapy May Reduce Pain and Anxiety in Children Undergoing Medical and Dental Procedures’ https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC2778574/ [Accessed 31st January 2022]