While most people can opt for a slow instrumental track to help them drift off to sleep at the end of the day, researchers believe high-energy songs can be just as effective.
After analyzing nearly 1,000 songs on Spotify, experts have suggested that listening to familiar, high-energy music can be as effective as relaxing sounds in putting people to sleep.
Researchers at Aarhus University analyzed more than 200,000 songs from 985 sleep-related playlists on the music app using SpotifyAPI – a program that can retrieve and manage data.
They identified six distinct subcategories of music people listen to to sleep, three of which had the typical slower, calmer melody, which more often featured acoustic instruments and a few lyrical notes.
However, other features included much faster and louder tracks that had a higher degree of energy, such as Dynamite by Korean boy band BTS.
Beautiful, a song by Billie Eilish and Khalid, were also among the tracks that help with relaxation and sleep.
The authors of the study, published in the journal Plos One, suggested that these songs could help calm people down because of their familiarity.
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They added, however, that more research will be needed to explore this and “identify the various reasons why different people choose different music for sleep.”
The results also revealed that there is no “one size fits all” when it comes to the music people choose for sleeping.
The researchers found that although the music associated with sleep is “softer, slower, instrumental, and more often played on acoustic instruments than other music, the music people use for sleep shows wide variation, including music characterized by high energy and tempo”.
They added: “The study may both inform the clinical use of music and advance our understanding of how music is used to regulate human behavior in everyday life.”
BTS broke YouTube records in 2020 with their song Dynamite – the video had over 100 million views within 24 hours of its release and has now surpassed over a billion streams on Spotify.
