Sound and Its Role in Ritual and Relaxation

Sound and Its Role in Ritual and Relaxation

Sound, ritual and relaxation

Have you ever noticed how quickly music can change the way you feel? A favourite song lifts you on a grey morning, an upbeat playlist carries you through a workout, and a slow piece in the evening helps you settle. Sound is woven into every human culture, from lullabies to temple bells. In this article we look at what research actually tells us about sound and music, where the evidence is encouraging, and where popular claims run ahead of it.

How we hear (and feel) sound

Sound is vibration. A vibrating object, whether a guitar string, a singing bowl or your own vocal cords, sets the air around it moving in pressure waves. When those waves reach you, they travel through the ear canal to the eardrum, which starts to vibrate. Three tiny bones in the middle ear amplify that movement and pass it to the cochlea, a fluid-filled, snail-shaped structure in the inner ear. There, thousands of sensory hair cells turn the movement into electrical signals, which the auditory nerve carries to the brain. Only then do we "hear" a melody, a voice or the rain.1

We don't only hear sound; we can also feel it. Anyone who has stood near a large gong or a bass speaker knows that low tones can be sensed as a gentle buzz in the chest or under the feet. Resonance shows the same principle in a more dramatic way: an object such as a wine glass has its own natural frequency, and a sound that matches it can make the glass vibrate more and more strongly.

Music, stress and relaxation

The largest body of research concerns music and stress. A 2020 meta-analysis in Health Psychology Review combined 104 randomised controlled trials with more than 9,600 participants. Music interventions were associated with lower stress on both psychological measures (such as reported tension or anxiety) and physiological measures (heart rate, blood pressure and stress hormones such as cortisol). The effects were small to moderate: roughly d = 0.55 for psychological outcomes and d = 0.38 for physiological ones, with heart rate showing the clearest change.2

That is a meaningful finding, but not a magic one. A separate 2022 meta-analysis looked specifically at how quickly people recover after a stressful task in the lab, and found no significant overall benefit of music listening for that kind of recovery.3 The honest summary: music can help many people feel calmer, the measurable effects are modest, and results depend on the setting, the person and the music.

Music, pleasure and mood

Why does music move us so much? A well-known study in Nature Neuroscience scanned the brains of people listening to music they loved. When they felt "chills" at the emotional peak of a piece, dopamine was released in the brain's reward system (the nucleus accumbens). Even in the moments of anticipation just before that peak, dopamine release rose in a neighbouring region, the caudate.4 In other words, music engages the same reward pathways involved in other pleasurable experiences. It was a small study (eight participants), but it helps explain why a favourite song can feel so rewarding.

Music and sleep

Many people use calm music to wind down at night. A 2022 Cochrane review, one of the most rigorous forms of evidence summary, analysed 13 randomised trials with 1,007 adults with insomnia symptoms. Listening to music was found to improve self-reported sleep quality, with moderate certainty of evidence. For other outcomes, such as how long it takes to fall asleep or total sleep time, the evidence was weaker, and the few studies with objective sleep measurements did not show clear improvements.5

Music therapy: a professional discipline

Listening to a playlist is not the same as music therapy. Music therapy is a recognised clinical profession: it is the evidence-based use of music within a therapeutic relationship, delivered by a credentialed professional who has completed an approved training programme.6 Music therapists work in hospitals, care homes, mental health services and rehabilitation, always alongside medical care.

There are several established approaches. Neurologic Music Therapy (NMT) is a standardised set of clinical techniques that uses music to support people working on cognitive, speech and motor skills. Nordoff-Robbins music therapy, developed by Paul Nordoff and Clive Robbins from the late 1950s, is an active approach in which people play, improvise and make music together with the therapist.

The flip side: noise

Sound can also be a burden. According to the World Health Organization, environmental noise is among the top environmental risks to health in Europe. Its 2018 guidelines link long-term exposure to traffic noise with sleep disturbance, annoyance and cardiovascular effects, and recommend keeping road traffic noise below 53 dB on average and below 45 dB at night.7 Choosing the sounds around you, and choosing silence, can be just as valuable as choosing music.

Popular claims: what does the evidence say?

Singing bowls and sound baths

Singing bowls, gongs, chanting and humming have been part of meditation and ritual in many cultures for centuries, and many people find a sound bath deeply relaxing. Research is still limited. One frequently cited study followed 62 adults through a single singing bowl meditation and found that they reported less tension, anger and fatigue afterwards.8 It had no control group, so we can't tell whether the bowls themselves, the meditation, or simply lying down quietly for an hour made the difference. A lovely experience, then, but not a proven treatment.

Binaural beats

Binaural beats play two slightly different tones in each ear, creating the sensation of a third "beat". The idea is that this tunes your brainwaves to a calmer or more focused state. A 2023 systematic review of 14 studies found inconsistent results: five supported this "entrainment" idea, eight did not and one was mixed.9 Enjoy them if you like the sound, but the claims are not settled.

432 Hz and "solfeggio frequencies"

You may have read that music tuned to 432 Hz, or specific "solfeggio frequencies", has special effects on body or mind. There is no good evidence for this. The research consists of very small pilot studies, for example one with 12 patients, whose authors themselves call for larger trials.10 In the larger studies above, what seems to matter most is that people enjoy the music and find it calming, not its exact tuning.

Famous quotes

Articles about sound often quote Albert Einstein ("everything in life is vibration") or Nikola Tesla ("think in terms of energy, frequency and vibration"). These lines circulate widely online, but we could not trace them to a reliable original source, so we have chosen not to present them as genuine quotes.

A calm moment with sound

You don't need special equipment or frequencies to enjoy sound as part of your wellbeing routine. A few simple ideas:

  • Make a calm playlist of music you genuinely enjoy, ideally with a slow, steady tempo and few lyrics.
  • Breathe with the music. Let your breath slow down and follow the rhythm for a few minutes, with your shoulders relaxed.
  • Protect your quiet. Turn off background noise, close a window to traffic, or simply sit in silence for five minutes.
  • Wind down in the evening with soft music at a low volume instead of a screen.
  • Make sound yourself. Humming, singing or playing an instrument can be a joyful, grounding way to end the day.

Looking for a starting point? Here's a playlist to relax to: listen on Spotify.

A final note

Sound is one of the simplest ways to create a moment of calm, and research shows that music can help many people feel more relaxed and sleep better. At the same time, it is not a substitute for medical care. This article is for general information and is not medical advice. If you are dealing with stress, sleep problems or other health concerns, please speak to your doctor. Music therapy is offered by qualified, registered music therapists.

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Sources

  1. National Institute on Deafness and Other Communication Disorders (NIDCD, NIH). How Do We Hear? Source ↗
  2. de Witte, M., Spruit, A., van Hooren, S., Moonen, X., & Stams, G.J. (2020). Effects of music interventions on stress-related outcomes: a systematic review and two meta-analyses. Health Psychology Review, 14(2), 294–324. doi:10.1080/17437199.2019.1627897 Source ↗
  3. Adiasto, K., Beckers, D.G.J., van Hooff, M.L.M., Roelofs, K., & Geurts, S.A.E. (2022). Music listening and stress recovery in healthy individuals: a systematic review with meta-analysis of experimental studies. PLoS ONE, 17(6), e0270031. doi:10.1371/journal.pone.0270031 Source ↗
  4. Salimpoor, V.N., Benovoy, M., Larcher, K., Dagher, A., & Zatorre, R.J. (2011). Anatomically distinct dopamine release during anticipation and experience of peak emotion to music. Nature Neuroscience, 14(2), 257–262. doi:10.1038/nn.2726 Source ↗
  5. Jespersen, K.V., Pando-Naude, V., Koenig, J., Jennum, P., & Vuust, P. (2022). Listening to music for insomnia in adults. Cochrane Database of Systematic Reviews, CD010459.pub3. doi:10.1002/14651858.CD010459.pub3 Source ↗
  6. American Music Therapy Association. What is Music Therapy? Source ↗
  7. World Health Organization, Regional Office for Europe (2018). Environmental Noise Guidelines for the European Region. ISBN 978-92-890-5356-3. Source ↗
  8. Goldsby, T.L., Goldsby, M.E., McWalters, M., & Mills, P.J. (2017). Effects of singing bowl sound meditation on mood, tension, and well-being: an observational study. Journal of Evidence-Based Complementary & Alternative Medicine. doi:10.1177/2156587216668109 Source ↗
  9. Ingendoh, R.M., Posny, E.S., & Heine, A. (2023). Binaural beats to entrain the brain? A systematic review of the effects of binaural beat stimulation on brain oscillatory activity, and the implications for psychological research and intervention. PLoS ONE, e0286023. doi:10.1371/journal.pone.0286023 Source ↗
  10. Calamassi, D., Lucicesare, A., Pomponi, G.P., & Bambi, S. (2020). Music tuned to 432 Hz versus music tuned to 440 Hz for improving sleep in patients with spinal cord injuries: a double-blind cross-over pilot study. Acta Biomedica, 91(12-S). doi:10.23750/abm.v91i12-S.10755 Source ↗
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