This 2-Week Spiritune Experiment Changed the Way I Listen to Music

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!

Our top five tips for the ultimate morning playlist: How to use music to unlock energy and focus:

While some lucky people seem to wake up with endless energy, most of us need to call in some liquid support in the mornings. Caffeine works by blocking certain brain receptors associated with drowsiness. But while it puts off yawns temporarily, caffeine doesn’t necessarily give us more energy—and it can compound fatigue in the long run (say, if we drink it too close to bedtime and disrupt our sleep).

Coffee or a caffeinated tea are great options for busy mornings, but it’s also worth trying other energizing strategies to help round out their effects. Enter: music! Music has its own stimulating impact on the brain and, when selected intentionally, can supply a mental boost and fight fatigue—without the jitters or crash. Here’s the science behind using music to unlock energy, and how to curate the perfect playlist to power your mornings.

Listening to music first thing in the morning can start the day on a high note.

Every time you press play on a song, you activate networks of your brain associated with memory, emotion, expectation, and reward. Depending on the type of music you’re listening to, your brain can respond by releasing certain chemicals that support energy and pleasure. 

Let’s start with oxytocin: Music is known to increase levels of oxytocin in the brain and body—the same “love hormone” that helps forge bonds between a mother and child. Daniel Bowling, Ph.D., Spiritune advisor and a leading expert in the neuroscience of music, notes that this helps explain why listening to music with other people can prompt feelings of connection. Oxytocin also helps buffer the body’s stress response, helping us start the day on the right foot.

When you listen to a song you enjoy, your brain also releases dopamine, the “pleasure hormone,” as the track reaches its musical peak. Dopamine interacts with some of the same brain infrastructure as caffeine, causing researchers to suspect that listening to music may reduce perceived exertion and restore motivation, making us feel like we have more energy and focus. (Though your personal relationship to the music makes a big difference here—more on why below.) 

Our bodies also tend to synchronize with the rhythm and tempo of music in a process known as entrainment. A landmark paper on musical neurodynamics notes that music’s temporal elements can subtly influence our heart rate, emotions, and body movements. In other words, we physically embody musical structure. From this perspective, it makes sense that “high-arousal” music (e.g., songs with faster tempos and more complex rhythms) may help us get over the hump of morning fatigue. 

While research directly investigating how music impacts energy levels first thing in the morning is limited, one study on 50 participants did find that waking up to melodic sounds seemed to ease perceived sleep inertia—the grogginess participants felt after waking—more than less melodic alarms. 

Though more research is needed, music does come with some energizing, mood-boosting (and side-effect-free!) benefits that may make for an easier wake-up. As the morning goes on, it can also go a long way in keeping the mind sharp. 

Later in the morning, music is a great companion for cognitively draining tasks.

As the morning progresses, many people need another pick-me-up to get through cognitively demanding tasks at work or at home. We all know the feeling of mental stupor that can cause us to reach for a second (or third… or fourth) cup of coffee. Though researchers aren’t exactly sure what causes mental fatigue symptoms, they suspect that after prolonged periods of focused thinking, certain molecules like glutamate might build up and negatively affect brain cell function. 

Music seems to offer an antidote by taking our mind off the task at hand, helping reduce the effort and mental exertion we think we need to put into it. In a science review called Does music counteract mental fatigue? authors note that a few different categories of music seem to help counteract brain strain: relaxing music, exciting music, and music that we personally really enjoy. When it comes to impacting cognition, not every type of tune will do the trick. 

Case in point: In research published last year, a group of healthy adults across the U.S. was asked to listen to one of four types of audio for 10 minutes: A Spiritune track, Spotify’s “Deep Focus” playlist, pop music from the Hot 100, or office noises. After the listening session, their mood was assessed and their cognitive speed was tested.

Spiritune’s Work Flow music was found to significantly improve participants’ positive affect (e.g., feelings of strength, enthusiasm, and determination) and decrease negative affect (e.g., feelings of stress, anxiety, and irritation) to a 4x greater degree than the other music conditions. People also scored higher on processing speed after listening to Spiritune—without losing accuracy. In fact, Spiritune music was the only music condition to improve this cognitive functionality.

In reflecting on what set Spiritune apart, study co-author Pablo Ripollés, Ph.D. says, "What we think is happening is this music is likable so it’s making people feel better and also it’s keeping people engaged because it has this groove.” It was likely the combination of strong groove, a slightly faster tempo, and minimal distracting elements (no lyrics) that helped promote energy and focus in this case. 

Tips for perfecting your morning playlist

To wrap things up, are the main ingredients for an energizing morning playlist based on research:

1. Choose energetic music for an energetic morning.  

Since your body tends to synchronize with certain rhythmic qualities of the music you listen to, tracks that are faster and more energetic may speed up your mornings. 

Conversely, Concetta Tomaino, Spiritune’s Music Therapy Advisor, notes that soothing, slow rhythms can reduce heart rate and lower anxiety, making them useful for times when you want to enter a calmer headspace (like right before bed).

2. … But be sure it’s something you like.

Your personal preferences play a major role in how music moves you. It doesn’t matter how upbeat and fast-tempo a track is: If you don’t like it, it won’t have as much of a positive effect on you. “Whether [a song is] therapeutic or not depends on the composer and on the listener,” Bowling says. 

Music that you are familiar with or that follows a recognizable, repeating pattern also tends to engage brain centers associated with expectation and reward. When you can anticipate where a song is headed next, and then it goes there, your brain responds by rewarding that successful prediction with a small surge of pleasure hormones. Learn more about the concept of musical reward here.

3. Find music that will wake up with you.

The iso principle is a core concept in music therapy that states that listening to music that matches your current mood or physiological state and then gradually transitions into your desired state seems to be most effective. Following this logic, you may want to ease into your morning by starting with softer, slower music that gets progressively faster, louder, or more upbeat.

4. Pair your music with coffee and other sensory treats.

Individually, music, coffee, and tea are a few of life’s great pleasures. And together, they may be even better! A study published in 2023 found that combining music with caffeine improved peak power during exercise compared with music alone. 

There’s also science to show that certain aromas can enhance energy and cognitive function. Consider building a morning routine that engages all the senses with strong coffee, zippy essential oils, and a great playlist.

5. Download Spiritune to let us do the curating for you.

Spiritune takes all the guesswork out of choosing music to move your mood. Our ‘Waking Up’ tracks leverage principles of neuroscience and music therapy to help listeners reach their goals quickly. 

Simply choose your starting mood and desired mindset (i.e., joyful, determined, excited, victorious) to set your personalized morning playlist into motion. Depending on your starting point, tracks will begin on the slower and more contemplative side, with an almost dreamy quality. As the beat comes in, your mind will get a little more tuned up and engaged. Then, you’ll be carried into a soundscape that is vibrant and energetic without being distracting. 

And as the morning progresses, Spiritune can become the ultimate sidekick for focused work, as demonstrated by the controlled trial on its cognitive benefits compared to other types of audio.

Give our ‘Waking Up’ tracks a try to see why Spiritune wins out over the snooze button.

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!