6 Defining Music Medicine Studies of 2025

Here’s what happened when one writer set out to broaden her musical horizons by listening to Spiritune tracks once a day for two weeks.

My name’s Emma, and I’m a writer fresh off of a musical experiment. We may not have officially met, but if you’re a Spiritune follower, you’ve likely read my words before. I write Spiritune’s blogs and monthly newsletters, which means I have the pleasure of exploring topics like the latest research on why certain songs impact energy levels, how to use sound for exercise and recovery, and even when astronauts listen to music during spaceflight (more than you might think, it turns out!).

Last year, one article in particular changed my relationship to music and sound: After digging into the findings of a randomized controlled study that found that Spiritune outperformed other music playlists at improving emotions and boosting cognitive processing speed, I was convinced to make the app a recurring fixture of my work routine. I’ve listened to its brain-sharpening Work Flow tracks at the office ever since. 

But my writing escapades have also taught me that there are so many other ways to use Spiritune’s tracks for a whole host of outcomes, be it reducing stress, regulating emotions, or deepening sleep. So earlier this month, I set out to broaden my harmonic horizons: I listened to Spiritune tracks at least once a day for two weeks, for a different purpose each time, and took note of how each one made me feel. 

Read on for a recap of this expansive musical experiment. While everyone responds to sound differently, I hope my experience sparks fresh ideas about how you can incorporate Spiritune into your own routine.

A day-by-day recap

October was a busy month for me, with lots of travel, work deadlines, and commitments that shook up my usual routine. At the outset of this experiment, I tried to map out the specific ways that I could use Spiritune most effectively each day. 

It was a little overwhelming to plan this out ahead of time, but then I realized I didn’t have to: The beauty of the app is that it can be used to meet the moment. I could simply open the app up any time I felt overwhelm, anxiety, distraction, or any other less-than-desireable sensation and it would play me a track designed to quickly carry me towards how I wanted to feel. Equipped with this freedom, I started my two-week listening spree. Here are snippets from each day:

• Day 1: Winding down on the road. I’m traveling for work, and I always find it extra hard to shut my brain off to go to sleep when I’m away from home. Tonight I’ve also been working late on my computer, so my mind is especially active. I put on a ‘Tense to Relax’ track and start to get ready for bed. The tune starts with heavy acoustics then gradually becomes more smooth and melodic. As it does, I find that I naturally sync my breath up to the music, elongating my inhales and exhales and dropping my shoulders a bit. As the track winds down after seven minutes or so, I’m ready to put my phone down. I’m getting sleepy. 

• Day 2: Exercise motivation. I’m feeling lethargic after a long work day, but I want to get a quick run in. The ‘Peaceful to Energized’ flow starts with sounds that remind me of a relaxing spa. I get on the treadmill and start walking to the beat. As the tempo gets more decisive and determined, I pick up my pace and soon I’m in a jog. 

• Day 3: Transitioning into work mode. I head back home this morning and need to go into work mode quickly once I arrive. Getting into the groove of work right after traveling doesn’t come easily for me, so I pop on a ‘Lethargic to Energetic’ track to coax my mind into deep focus mode. 

• Day 4: Morning mood turnaround. I’ve always thought that the phrase “woke up on the wrong side of the bed” was silly, but this morning, it makes sense. I slept through my alarm, feel daunted by my to-do list, and just want to crawl back in bed. I play the ‘Frustrated to Excited’ track called “A Smile at Dawn” and it quickly becomes one of my favorites on the app: The music is ethereal, groovy, and really pleasant, like a gentle trance. It captures the energy of a new day, starting sleepily and gradually building intensity and rhythm. As it plays on my walk to the office, I think about all I have to be grateful for. 

• Day 5: Getting in the groove of focused work. Today’s goal is to lock in to writing a big story. I put on a work-focused Spiritune track in the background as I do: a nice, upbeat alternative to the white noise I usually write to.

• Day 6: Walking with presence. I’m in a great mood today, so I’m just looking for music to help me further embrace the moment. I head out to take a walk in the glorious fall weather with an ‘Energetic to Joyful’ track in my headphones. While I usually listen to music with lyrics on my walks, the instrumental music is less distracting and it makes it easier to fully take in my surroundings and tune into my other senses: the sun on my skin, the sights of the season’s changing colors, and the sounds of New York City.

• Day 7: Staying steady through the 3pm lull. The afternoon slump has been hitting me hard lately, and I’m looking for ways to get through it that don’t involve reaching for yet more caffeine. Today, all of the words in the dense document I’m reading blur into one jumble and I find myself getting stuck on the same paragraph over and over. I play a ‘Lethargic to Energetic’ track, which begins softly and then has a really quick pickup; just the fresh burst of energy I need to re-engage with the task at hand.

• Day 8: Going from irritable to appreciative. I’m antsy and rushing to get chores done around my apartment—not necessarily the most exciting way to spend time, but a ‘Bored to Peaceful’ track helps it go by a little bit faster.

• Day 9: Falling asleep in a new place. I always miss my own bed when I’m away, and find unfamiliar spaces—no matter how comfortable—to be filled with distractions that keep me awake. This time, while traveling to visit family, I turn on one of Spiritune’s dedicated Sleep tracks as I’m trying to doze off. These longer tracks begin with 5-10 minutes of soft music then gradually transition into white noise. The soft chimes at the start of the track lull me to close my eyes, and I barely make it to the second part of the track before drifting off to sleep.

• Day 10: Transitioning into the weekend. Friday evening has arrived! But once I shut down my computer, the work thoughts don’t necessarily turn off with it. I’m looking for help taking my mind off work so I can be fully present with my family for the start of the weekend. While a cocktail would usually be my relaxing tool of choice, I try a Spiritune track instead and it turns out to be a side-effect free way to transition the mind from one mode to another.

• Day 11: Drowning out airport sounds. Why do flight delays always seem to happen in the most chaotic of airports? I have three hours to wait for my plane and I’m exhausted, but the screaming children and phone conversations around me are ruining any chance of a nap. I try to drown them out with a ‘Frustrated to Chill’ track and while it’s not quite immersive enough to make me fall asleep, it does help me relax and de-stress enough to see that extra time in an airport is not a big deal in the grand scheme of things.

• Day 12: Breaking up with the snooze button. My propensity to hit the snooze button over and over (and over) in the morning is one of my most deeply ingrained bad habits. Today I tried forcing myself to play a Spiritune Waking Up track after my first alarm went off instead. I did find that it helped me wake up in a timely fashion, the building melody acting like a jump cable for my sleepy brain.

• Day 13: Starting the day more alert. As soon as I’m out of bed today, I immediately turn on Spiritune to play in the background as I do my morning routine. While I’m typically groggy and out of it for the first part of my day, the music helps me jump into things faster—and it’s not too cloying or energetic for my 7am brain to handle.

• Day 14: Repeating the greatest hits. For the final day of my experiment, I took a victory lap and repeated some of my favorite use cases for Spiritune I’d gathered over the course of the two weeks. More on those below.

The results 

Looking back on the last few weeks, I can see that Spiritune was most helpful for me during moments of transition. It carried me between leisure mode and work mode and back with ease, helped gently steer my mind from an active to a resting state, and made the first moments waking up from sleep a little less terrible. 

Reviewing my notes from this little experiment shows me that a lot of the lowpoints of my day happen during these in-between moments. While it’s tempting to reach for vices like caffeine, alcohol, or social media to push through them, Spiritune is a side-effect free tool I’ll now confidently turn to instead. 

Here are some of the ways I’ll definitely be using the app moving forward:

• When navigating transition moments in the workday: Spiritune’s tracks helped me hop from one type of task to another, re-focusing on work after meetings or appointments, and switch my brain into relaxation mode after a long workday.

• When winding down in a new place: It can be hard for me to wind down and sleep while traveling, but Spiritune’s tracks helped me find comfort in the unfamiliar.

• When trying to relax in a high-stress environment: The next time I’m stuck in a loud airport or crowded area, you can bet that a calming Spiritune track will be playing in my headphones.

• When waking up in the morning: I’m still tinkering with the best way to incorporate Spiritune into my morning routine, but knowing that it can help me break my reliance on the snooze button feels like a huge unlock.

And even in instances when Spiritune didn’t work as well for me (it probably won’t be replacing my gym pump-up playlist or the white noise I listen to when doing deep work), the app still prompted me to name my emotions throughout the day—a valuable exercise in its own right.

Try it for yourself

This was clearly an n-of-1 trial, and everyone will have their own experience when using music therapeutically. Your favorite ways to use Spiritune may be completely different than mine depending on your lifestyle, routine, and mindset. So, I encourage you to try this experiment for yourself, and let us know the results!

Like what you're reading? Sign up for Spiritune’s newsletter to get a monthly music therapy download straight to your inbox. Haven’t tried Spiritune yet? Download it today with a free trial!

Music is a medicine with no age minimum or maximum. Here’s how to get the most out of it during every stage of life:

Few therapies are side-effect-free, affordable, and effective for all ages. Music is one of them. From supporting learning and development during childhood to combating mental decline in older adulthood, engaging with therapeutic tracks like Spiritune’s comes with proven benefits at every point of the lifespan. Here’s a through-the-ages guide to bringing music medicine into your routine and those of your loved ones.

Babies and toddlers:

From the moment you are born (and maybe even before), your body responds to musical stimuli. Research on newborns shows that they are able to not just track rhythms, but anticipate where they’re headed next, and music has been shown to have a therapeutic effect on babies who spend their first weeks of life in intensive care units. 

It’s no wonder that parents, across cultures and over centuries, have sung lullabies to relax and connect with their children. It turns out that these melodies promote bonding down to a chemical level. “There's this rich connection that develops between a mother and infant through oxytocin,” says Daniel Bowling, Ph.D., Spiritune's Scientific Co-Founder and Director or the Stanfor Music, Brain & Health Lab. Lullabies seem to go a long way in promoting trust and letting kids know they are safe and cared for, ultimately benefiting their learning and development later in life. 

Tips for this age: 

• Sing or play lullabies for babies before bed to promote bonding and trust, and if you're breastfeeding you can play music then too.

• Keep music on in the background while your baby or toddler is playing

Children:

As children get older, music remains an essential developmental companion. There’s some overlap in the regions of the brain responsible for musical processing and emotional processing, and research on 3- to 12-year-olds has found that music can help strengthen emotional intelligence, academic performance, and prosocial skills—while reducing anxiety and depression. A study in Nature Reviews Neuroscience summarizes music’s importance to growing children in saying: “Akin to physical exercise and its impact on body fitness, music is a resource that tones the brain for auditory fitness.”

Learning how to play an instrument when you’re young seems to support brain health in yet more ways. Children with musical training tend to have better verbal memory, reading ability, and executive function, leading a group of Swiss researchers to conclude that “the advice for parents and educators is clear: promote instrumental training in early childhood, as it may result in life-long advantages.” Starting by the time kids are 5- to 7-years-old seems to be a sweet spot for neural development, their study suggests.

Tips for this age: 

• Invite your child to choose music that matches their mood in order to help them explore their emotions

• If your child shows interest in music, encourage them to take up an instrument 

Adolescents:

During teenage years, you start to form more personal relationships with music. You may gravitate towards certain genres over others and get a better sense of the types of songs you like and don’t like. And the music you engage with during this time plays an outsize role in shaping your musical taste for life. 

As teenagers gain independence, they can start to be more intentional about the types of songs they listen to and when. They may benefit from beginning to play around with using music to reach certain goals—be it to reduce stress at school or quiet the mind before bed.

Partner spotlight: Spiritune x Yale University

Through our partnership with Yale University’s The Good Life Center, we offer students a free Spiritune subscription they can use to access therapeutic music throughout the school year. “Many have shared that Spiritune has noticeably improved their ability to concentrate and manage stress while studying,” Bethel Asomaning, The Good Life Center’s Director of Programming, says. Learn more about the program and its early results here.

Tips for this age:

• If you’re the parent of a teen, try leading by example and playing music to match the mood and energy of certain times of day

• Encourage musical exploration so teens can pinpoint their particular tastes along with using functional music for specific needs like studying, calming nerves and more.

Adults:

Music can help you manage work to-dos, family responsibilities, and other joys of adulting with a bit more energy and focus. 

Some of the most popular ways that adults in our community use Spiritune include getting into the zone at work, starting the morning energized, and going from anxious to chill. Music can help fulfill all of these goals, in part because of the way that the body tends to “sync up” with the sounds around it. For example, listening to high-arousal music that has faster tempos and more complex rhythms can be helpful for snapping out of morning fatigue, while soft, smooth, slower tracks can help impart a sense of calm.

When it comes to goal-oriented music, research suggests that listening to tracks that match up with your current mood or physical state and then gradually transition into your desired state tends to be the most effective. This is why all of Spiritune’s tracks are composed to take listeners on a sonic journey from one type of sound—and one type of state—to another, quickly and easily. 

“I've been using [Spiritune] for a week during the workday to help me focus on tasks, and it has been incredible. Feels like a total mind hack, in a good way... I like the interface that lets you choose how you're feeling and where you want to end up,” reads one review.  Learn more about the process our composers use to produce effective therapeutic tracks here.

Tips for this age:

• Listen to music that matches the way you want to feel while going about your day (Spiritune makes this super easy!)

• If you’re choosing music for focus and productivity at work, minimize distracting elements like lyrics, overlapping instruments, and key changes (again, Spiritune does this for you.)

Older adults:

As you get older, many of music’s more clinical benefits come into sharper focus. For example, a growing body of research has shown that listening to music can be an effective way to relieve pain, both chronic and acute. “When you’re listening to pleasurable music, there’s a release of dopamine and serotonin, which gives you a pleasurable feeling. That ends up diminishing the pain experience,” says Concetta Tomaino, DA, Spiritune’s music therapy advisor. 

Music is also closely tied to memory, making it an ally for later-in-life cognition. Listening to familiar songs activates the emotion- and memory-processing regions of the brain, evoking powerful autobiographical memories and potentially helping to ease or delay cognitive declines. Research has shown that music interventions can improve cognition in those without existing cognitive impairment, as well as serve to ease symptoms of disorders like Parkinson’s and Alzheimer's disease.

Tips for this age:

• Listen to playlists that correspond to certain times of your youth to elicit positive memories 

• Work with a music therapist for a more clinically guided approach to memory care

No matter your age, or the age of your loved ones, Spiritune is designed to help you feel better, focus better, and relax more easily with the help of music. Sign up for our newsletter to get a monthly music therapy download straight to your inbox. New to Spiritune? Download the app today with a free trial!

Here’s how Spiritune’s team of composers, scientists, and curators makes the therapeutic soundtracks you’ll find on our app.

Every Spiritune soundtrack takes listeners on a sonic journey from one emotion to the next. But before that can happen, each track goes through a journey of its own—one that travels through the realms of scientific research, smart technology, and artistic creativity. Here’s a look into the step-by-step process we use to create new music for our app.

Step 1: Set a strong foundation

To understand how our music is made, you need to travel back to the earliest days of Spiritune. In 2016, our founder and CEO Jamie Pabst assembled a team of neuroscience, music therapy, and composition experts to explore a central question: Is it possible to write a formula for music that delivers genuine therapeutic value?

In search of an answer, our team identified the main emotions that people tend to feel throughout the day. To keep ourselves organized and grounded, we created what’s known as a “two-dimensional affect plot”—a graphical representation of mental states with axes for emotions (moving from negative to positive) and energy (moving from low to high). This left us with four quadrants: high energy and negative emotion, high energy and positive emotion, low energy and negative emotion, and low energy and positive emotion.

From there, we plotted the most common emotions into their respective buckets: ‘Determined,’ ‘energized,’ and ‘joyful’ belonged in the high-energy and positive-emotion quadrant, for example, while ‘anxious,’ ‘frustrated,’ and ‘angry’ were more high-energy but negative-emotion. We also considered the times of day when emotional and cognitive support are most needed: When waking up, working, winding down, and getting to sleep.

Putting all of this information together, we came up with roughly 30 therapeutic journeys that people might want to take throughout their day—be it lethargic to energetic in the morning or anxious to relaxed at night. 

“And then it came to, well, what are the things that need to go into our music tracks to compose for these types of therapeutic goals?” says Pabst.

By leveraging musical elements like rhythm, pitch, melody, and harmony, our team was able to create briefs (or “sonic recipes,” as we call them) that serve as the foundation for creating music tracks that would successfully carry listeners along on these journeys. “That’s still the core of how we think about composing,” says Pabst. 

While the Spiritune team has tweaked and tightened these recipes a bit over time, the same fundamental process is still used to make every new track on our platform.

Step 2: Follow the recipe, with a twist

Utilizing the sonic recipes, we then turn to our network of 30 or so composers to turn it into a science-based soundtrack. 

A composer will use the sonic recipe we give them as a jumping-off point, but they’ll add their own artistic spin during the composition process. This means that the same brief can be executed many different ways, depending on the composer producing it. “I love the mix of one part standardization and science, and one part human creativity,” says Pabst. 

We decide which types of briefs to give composers next using listener feedback and app data. For example, if we see that many ‘Hearted’ tracks in the Spiritune app have a strong drum beat, we’ll request that composers use percussion or high-groove elements in their compositions. And if lots of listeners are seeking anxious-to-chill at work journeys, we’ll compose more tracks for that category. We also constantly reference new research in neuroscience and music therapy to ensure our parameters match up with the latest science. 

Step 3: Review the track 

Once a composer is done with a first draft of a new track, they’ll pass it to our team for review. We use a combination of human and machine learning to ensure the audio fulfills the sonic brief requirements.

When Spiritune first got started, back before AI was what it is today, we trained a computer model to analyze the energy and emotion of our audio tracks. Through this methodology, we are able to assign the music composition a score based on how well the music features match the intended emotional states (i.e., anxious to chill). The really cool thing is that it assigns a score for every three seconds of music as the track evolves, so we can monitor how tracks move through our emotional affect plot in real time. 

While this digital tool is impressive, it can’t replace the ear of a trained musician or an expert with scientific know-how. So we also put new tracks through a human editorial review. Members of our music editorial team—which includes neuroscientist Daniel Bowling, Ph.D., music therapist Concetta Tomaino, and a few other music curators—will listen to it and judge for themselves how it evokes the intended emotional response. Using these two layers of oversight, we’ll decide whether a track is ready to publish or if further drafts are needed.

In some cases, tracks go through several iterations before you can press play on them. But in general, the more composers work with us, the better they get at nailing the brief quickly and successfully. “We're always saying that Spiritune tracks just keep getting better and better,” says Pabst. “It's not necessarily that our science is changing. It’s that composers, over time, become more naturally attuned to what we're trying to accomplish and they develop, evolve and perfect their creative process accordingly.” 

Step 4: Share a finished product that moves you—and your mood

Every time you open the Spiritune app, you have access to our expansive music library, with new tracks typically added multiple times a week.

Once you choose your current mood state and your desired mood state, the app will serve up a playlist of tracks that have been conceptualized, composed, and refined to help you make that transition quickly. 

While each track offers a different listening experience, they all use standardized elements like groove and rhythm to serve a functional and science-backed purpose. And they’re all designed to be accessible to a wide variety of listeners. You won’t find any genre-specific music like hardcore rock or synth-heavy EDM on the platform; our tracks are genre-agnostic to please a broad range of musical tastes.

“The music is written to be broadly accessible. It’s simple, it's repetitive, it has a structure that's easy to learn and anticipate,” says Bowling, our neuroscience advisor. It also leverages groove in a way that is “directly associated with reward stimulation and the fun and enjoyment of music.” 

Carolyn Divone, Senior Director at Crunch Fitness, one of Spiritune’s clients, says “Spiritune is a game-changer for me personally, and it was a no-brainer to bring this to the Crunch Fitness community. It ties into our more recent focus on mental health, and I love the neuroscience focus of how the music is created, and it really works. This is a big value-add to Crunch employees and members nationwide, and more recently Spiritune has been a perfect fit for our new Relax and Recover spaces - allowing members to immediately relax after a hard workout.”

And there you have it! That’s the process we use to compose music that is clinically shown to move you—and your mood. 

Like what you're reading? Sign up for Spiritune’s newsletter to get a monthly music therapy download straight to your inbox. Haven’t tried Spiritune yet? Download it today with a free trial!