2023-05-03 05:20:00
Music and sleep are related from the beginning of life. Mothers sing them to their babies to make them fall asleep, there are people who listen to them to relax before going to sleep, and even therapies for sleep disorders who experiment with them to improve their results. The Pompeu Fabra University (UPF) in Barcelona is participating in a European project that aims to find out how music affects the brain before and during sleep and what are the most effective qualities that can be used to induce it. The research is called Lullabyte and wants to study this relationship taking into account the needs and profiles of each person to find an alternative to drug treatments.
The work is going to focus on finding out how music or sound can help not only to fall asleep, but also to sleep more soundly and in a more restful way, explains Sergi Jordá, principal investigator of the project at UPF. “Although we spend a third of our lives sleeping, it is curious how little is known [sobre el tema]”, Add.
The Lullabyte project lullaby, “lullaby”) unites musicology and neuroscience with other disciplines such as psychology, computer science and data science. Jordá assures that it is the first time that the issue has been addressed from a completely interdisciplinary perspective. In addition to the Catalan university, nine other institutions from Germany, the Netherlands and Denmark, among others, are participating in the research. The research, which began this year, will last until 2026 and is endowed with almost two and a half million euros from the Horizon Europe program.
UPF’s work within this project is to study patients while they sleep and also to investigate how to convert the information extracted from their brain waves into music or sound. Jordá says that they will start with synthetic sounds, “something like electronic music”, generated in real time. “Somehow, what happens in your own brain will control what you sound like,” she expands. In this way they aim to achieve a completely personalized form of treatment.
Ana Fernández, Coordinator of the Sleep Study Group of the Spanish Society of Neurology (SEN), believes that knowing this relationship can help improve sleep, especially for people with difficulties falling asleep and maintaining it. “It is a low-cost treatment, it has no side effects and it would be a good non-pharmacological intervention”, she highlights with conviction. Between 25% and 35% of people in Spain suffer from transitory insomnia, and more than four million people suffer from it chronically, according to data from the SEN.
Some previous works have already observed that, when there are sleep problems, music is an improvement compared to doing nothing and listening to audiobooks or white noise, says the neurologist. Although she acknowledges that studies on the subject are still scarce because it has only recently been investigated.
Proven, but limited benefits
In 2021, a meta-analysis published in the journal Behavioral Sleep Medicine found that the intervention with music helped improve patients admitted to coronary units and intensive care units, as well as the sleep of the elderly. Its authors saw that it was more effective after the first three weeks and when the exposure lasted less than 30 minutes. The utility wasn’t huge, but they did attribute small benefits to sleep quality, efficiency, and sleep onset latency (the time it takes a person to fall asleep).
Another review published the same year in Journal of the American Geriatrics Society stated that between 40% and 70% of the elderly have trouble sleeping and more than 40% suffer from insomnia. Along these lines, according to the authors, music improved the sleep quality of these people, who lived at home, when they listened to it between 30 minutes and an hour before going to bed. The researchers blamed its effect on the music’s ability to lower heart rate, respiration and blood pressure, thereby reducing anxiety and stress.
Ana Fernández, from the SEN, agrees with this statement and speaks of a noise masking effect. There are people with insomnia who are awakened by any stimulus and put on alert, so music isolates them from external sounds and prevents their sleep from being interrupted. There are other qualities that are also being considered, but are less proven: such as psychological relaxation and the ability to reduce ruminative thoughts or intrusive ideas at night, explains the neurologist.
Medicines put us to sleep, but they do it badly
Sergi Jordá principal investigator of the Lullabyte project at UPF
However, not all the scientific literature agrees that this relationship is good. Two years ago a Baylor University study published in the journal Psychological Science claimed that listening to music close to bedtime could produce what these researchers called earworms (literally, “worms in the ears”), when a song or melody is played continuously in a person’s head. Something that could happen even while you’re asleep. The authors claimed that those who experience this sensation were six times more likely to have poor quality sleep.
Currently, treatments using benzodiazepines and Z-drugs (similar to the former, such as zolpidem) are used for insomnia and other sleep problems, which have numerous side effects ranging from daytime sleepiness to memory loss. “They are medicines that make us sleepy, but they do it badly”, asserts Sergi Jordá, from UPF. The researcher says that they induce a dream that is not natural and that is less restful. Lullabyte’s goal is to achieve notable improvements in people who suffer from these problems so that they don’t have to resort to drugs to rest, he concludes.
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