Researchers from the University of Aarhus in Denmark looked at which music was listened to the most before sleeping… Result: the most popular song was “Dynamite” by the K-Pop group BTS.
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Music is used by many people like sleep aid, but not all musical pieces are created equal. At the University of Aarhus in Denmark, a team of researchers wanted to determine the characteristics of the pieces of music listened to before sleeping: musical genre, tempo, rhythm, etc.
“Throughout history, lullabies have been used to help children sleep, and today, with the increasing accessibility of recorded music, many people report listening to music as a tool for improve sleep”they note in their study published on January 18 in Plos One.
For their work conducted in the fall of 2020, the authors collected data via the Spotify music streaming platform used around the world. They looked sideways reading lists music tracks associated with sleep (these included the word “sleep” in several languages). About 1,000 playlists were studied.
Rhythmic but relaxing music
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Results : “compared to the music in general, we found that sleep music was more gentle and more springshe was more often instrumental (i.e. without words) and played on acoustic instruments”, they write. Still, a large amount of the tunes associated with sleep were fast, loud and energetic popular songs, the study shows. Proof of this is that the most popular track – which appeared 245 times – was “Dynamite” by K-pop group BTS.
K-pop as dynamic and rhythmic as it is, could it help to find sleep? Previous studies have instead shown that the most popular musical genre before sleeping was classical music. “You could say that music with high energy and dance ability” such as K-pop “would be counter-productive for la relaxation and sleep, but it is possible that it may increase relaxation considering the interplay between repeated exposure, familiarity and predictive processing.” So it doesn’t matter if the music makes you want to dance or sing, if it’s known to the person she can help him get to sleep.
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Is it good to listen to music before sleeping?
Regarding the beneficial effects of music on sleep, many studies contradict each other. For researchers who studied the question in 2018, “it reduces anxiety, the feeling of physical pain, or even the levels of the stress hormone cortisol. It increases the secretion of oxytocin, the hormone of happiness and attachment, and causes the feeling of relaxation. Music is regularly used in the self-regulation of the emotional state in order to decrease negative thoughts”they note in their research.
Conversely, a study published in 2021 revealed that starting a playlist before sleeping was not a good idea because of the earworms (musical excerpt that stays in the head) it causes.
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