Your New Favorite Music Is Heavy on the Science

The New York City Marathon is coming up this weekend, which means thousands of athletes are busy preparing for the big day: gathering their gear, upping their carb intake, and of course, curating the perfect playlist. 

Working out just isn’t the same without music, with one survey finding that 65% of Americans polled said they’d have “no motivation” to exercise without their tunes of choice. But what is it about music that helps us crush our athletic goals? Can sounds really make a difference in our performance, or is it just a placebo effect?

Here’s the science behind how music impacts mental and physical performance, and how to strategically use sound to nail your next workout.

The Science of a Sweat Playlist

Music can turn around your mood within minutes, making it a valuable tool when you’re faced with a daunting workout in the gym, on the mat, or at the track. 

Research shows that exercising with music enhances positive mood more than working out in silence, which can lead to better results. In one 2018 study published in Sport, Exercise, and Performance Psychology, male and female athletes running on a treadmill selected more challenging settings, ran with more intensity, and felt better while doing it when they were able to listen to music. 

In addition to improving mood, certain music can serve as a distraction from the pain and discomfort of exercise. For evidence, we can look to a 2023 study that observed 28 healthy people as they completed functional workouts. 

Participants were carefully selected for their opposing musical tastes: For every person who enjoyed listening to a particular song, another person disliked it. Athletes reported feeling less pain when listening to their favorite songs than they did when listening to music they disliked or no music at all. Brain scans verified that listening to preferred music was associated with reduced activity in brain regions that respond to pain. 

Some researchers attribute this physiological response to the "bottleneck hypothesis," which theorizes that the human nervous system can only process a certain amount of sensory input at a time. 

This suggests that music’s workout benefits aren’t just a placebo. Music is, in a sense, “competing” with exercise-induced pain to capture your brain’s attention—and winning.

There is also an element of entrainment—the syncing up of your body with music—at play when you exercise to your favorite tunes. Your heart rate and blood pressure tend to align with musical tempo, speeding up during faster songs and calming down during slower ones. Musical patterns may also influence the speed and intensity of your physical movements, as shown in this research on walking cadence. 

These responses can allow you to push through discomfort for longer and stave off mental and even muscular fatigue during exercise. With this comes an increase in performance and anaerobic power (the body's ability to produce high-intensity, explosive energy without using oxygen). Music-induced benefits have been recorded during all types of exercises and sports—from endurance to resistance training, from taekwondo to sprinting. And it’s not just the pros who stand to gain: the same effects have been seen in trained athletes and recreational exercisers alike.

Turning Up the Volume on Recovery

Don’t turn off the music as soon as your sweat session is over; it’s been shown to aid in exercise recovery as well.

One of the best indications of this is the way that music impacts heart rate variability (HRV)—a measure of the balance between the two branches of your nervous system: parasympathetic (rest and digest) and sympathetic (fight or flight). In short, a higher HRV signals that your body is more responsive to the parasympathetic nervous system, indicating that you are better equipped to recover from stressors. 

“Heart Rate Variability (HRV) is one of the most powerful indicators of how the body adapts to demands—physical, mental, and emotional… It helps reveal how recovered or resilient someone truly is,” says Alexi Coffey, VP of Product at WHOOP—a wearable health companion that turns complex physiological data into clear, actionable feedback, and includes HRV as one of its key metrics.

Certain music—particularly slow, relaxing classical tunes—has been shown to increase HRV, making it a potentially helpful post-workout tool for kickstarting recovery. 

While WHOOP has not done any formal research on the relationship between music and heart rate or HRV just yet, Coffey considers it a fascinating area. “Music can elicit powerful physiological responses—from lowering heart rate and promoting calm to increasing arousal and focus before competition,” she says.

Spiritune Spotlight: Crunch Fitness is equipping its members to prioritize recovery with its new Relax & Recover® wellness rooms. These spaces contain proven recovery tools like massage devices, red light therapies, infrared saunas, and, of course, a selection of music medicine. Spiritune and Crunch have joined together to incorporate Spiritune tracks into these spaces to help gym-goers relax, unwind, and recover faster so they can continue to show up as their strongest selves.

“Our Relax & Recover spaces used to play our gym music, which was not conducive to relaxing the mind and body,” says Carolyn Divone, a Senior Director at Crunch. “It is great that Spiritune’s composers have extensive knowledge on how one can achieve their emotional goals within minutes… Spiritune has been a perfect fit for this space.”

Putting It Into Practice 

Ready to start using music to your advantage more during exercise? First and foremost, choose songs or melodies that you actually enjoy listening to. Personal preference plays a surprisingly significant role in how your body responds to music, with preferred songs consistently outperforming non-preferred songs in terms of performance metrics. So if the songs on your gym’s loudspeaker don’t do it for you, tee up your own music to listen to on headphones.

As for what tunes to choose for the ideal workout playlist, it depends on the exercise you’re doing. Since your heart rate and blood pressure tend to synch up with musical tempo, you’ll want to consider whether a faster or slower beat better suits the session. Faster songs (above 120 beats per minute or so) can fuel fast, high-octane moves, while slower beats may be more effective for slower, more focused movements, as well as calming anxious energy before a daunting workout or recovering after exercise. (Wondering about the tempo of your favorite track? This tool can tell you the BPM of any song.)

Spiritune makes it easy to tailor your music to your workout goals. Download the app to create personalized tracks that use neuroscience to match the mood and intensity you are starting your workout with—and the one you want to eventually reach—with a few clicks of a button. No BPM calculations or endless music service scrolling required. Spiritune also seamlessly integrates into the Apple HealthKit to record your listening sessions alongside your HRV data, so you can work out—and wind down—more intentionally and effectively. Music to any athlete’s ears.

Earlier this month, St. Bartholomew’s Church in midtown Manhattan filled with an ethereal soundtrack. It was not the sound of a typical Sunday Service. The songs were arranged using the principles of neuroscience to heighten their emotional impact, taking them from tranquil to transcendent.

When the legendary fashion designer Prabal Gurung first asked Spiritune to help develop the music for his New York Fashion Week show, “Angels in America,” our team knew right away that this was a special opportunity. We were even more excited to learn that the incredibly talented musician Chloe Flower would be our collaborator for the live choir performance in St Bartholomew. 

The end result was even more powerful than we could have imagined. Gurung’s show, set to the soundtrack that Spiritune helped shape, exemplified music’s ability to heighten emotions, bring people together, and spark moments that can only be described as spiritual.

The Intersection of Music and Fashion 

Gurung is a designer who thinks as much about emotions as he does fabrics. With each show, he creates space for his audience to have a deeply embodied experience. 

His “Angels in America” show was built on the concept of non-denominational angels—the people who lift us up when the world feels heavy. During dark times, angels are the ones who allow us to hope. Gurung wanted to invite the audience to consider their personal angels—and he saw music as the perfect vehicle to guide this reflection. 

Beyond inducing deep emotions on an individual level, music also has the capacity to bring us together. When we listen to music in public (especially in a space as sonically rich as a church!), our heart rates and breathing patterns tend to synchronize with those around us. When we feel moved by a piece of music, this connection becomes even stronger.

In order to heighten the emotional response and connection to the NYFW soundtrack, Daniel Bowling, Ph.D., the Neuroscience Co-founder at Spiritune, considered the biology of vocal expression and the neuroscience of rhythm. His scientific direction was masterfully blended into the art of performance by Chloe Flower. 

As for the outcome, David Graver of Surface Magazine describes the show as “stirring” and writes that it “lifted attendees into a satisfying, ethereal emotional arc.” Read Graver’s complete coverage of the event here.  

“This collection is about love, strength, and overcoming, and with Jamie and Dan's guidance, we were able to create a powerful soundtrack,” Gurung tells Surface.

Beyond the Runway

The musical elements of the show paired beautifully with Gurung’s new designs. “The collection unfolds against this backdrop of sound carefully designed to carry you on an emotional arc: grounding, lifting, and resonating in a way that leaves you changed when you walk out,” our Founder and CEO Jamie Pabst says of the event. “It’s as much a feeling as it is a fashion show.”

The show reinforced that music and art can transcend time by evoking ideas and emotions that stay with us long after the final note.

"Spiritune exists to show the world how music can be more than entertainment—it can be a tool for emotional well-being, connection, and even transcendence. Music unlocks our deepest emotions of joy, awe, and wonder, and in doing so, helps us thrive,” Pabst tells Surface.

We all agree the world needs joyful, inspiring moments now more than ever. And we’ve seen that when music and science come together, change is not far behind. We are so grateful to Gurung and Flower for allowing us to introduce a new audience to the transformative power of the Spiritune model.

Head to the app store to try it out for yourself (App Store / Google Play). 

I can’t get more than a few seconds into the song “Midnight City” without thinking of nights driving around Sydney, Australia, as a college kid. And Springsteen’s “Thunder Road” never fails to transport me to my first post-pandemic vacation, on the cobblestone streets of Charleston, South Carolina.

I’m not alone in my headphone time travels. Everyone gets a music-evoked memory at one point or another. When’s the last time music took you somewhere else, and where did you go?

Researchers are just beginning to dig into why music can evoke such vivid and specific memories. Here’s what they’ve discovered so far—and how to use the connection between music, memory, and emotion to your advantage this summer and beyond.

The transportive power of music

Music, more than other sensory cues, can transport us back to specific times in our lives. Listening to a nostalgic song tends to evoke more detailed, emotionally charged memories than looking at a photo, for example.

These are called music-evoked autobiographical memories, or MEAMs for short. Research shows that MEAMs tend to be strong, specific, and, in many cases, subconscious. Even those with dementia are still able to recall familiar songs and the life experiences associated with them in some cases.

It’s not clear what makes music so evocative, but the answer could lie in the brain regions that control emotion and memory. 

Yiren Ren, Ph.D., a cognitive neuroscientist studying music and memory, recently set up an experiment that had people listen to music and recall certain memories while hooked up to an fMRI scanner. After analyzing the results, Ren and collaborators noticed enhanced activity in the amygdala (the brain’s emotional center) and the hippocampus (essential for storing and retrieving memories) during the exercise.

“This is why a song associated with a significant life event can feel so powerful – it activates both emotion- and memory-processing regions simultaneously,” Ren writes about her research in The Conversation.

Separate research finds that songs we consider more pleasurable tend to be the best at setting off this response, giving us a clue about how to use this mental marvel to our advantage. 

Who gets MEAMs the most?

Though everyone has their own experience with music-evoked autobiographical memories, research suggests that most people have them fairly frequently, at least once a day on average.

One study published in 2019 investigated when, exactly, these memories seemed to be most likely to occur. After asking 31 adults to track their music and memories throughout the day, researchers found that most MEAMs happened while they were driving or taking public transport, or while doing routine tasks or activities that are less cognitively demanding, like housework, relaxing, getting ready, or walking.

People over the age of 60 seem to experience more MEAMs than younger adults (potentially because they have more life experience to pull upon), and women may be more likely to get them than men.

Making memories with music

Most of us intuitively know that music can spark memories, but understanding the science of why and how this happens can help us use sound more intentionally in our daily lives. We can all get into the habit of time traveling with music, starting this summer.

The next time you have an experience that you want to remember, try making a playlist for it. Think of this playlist as a portal you can use to keep returning to that moment again and again. Play it in the background while you’re doing routine tasks that don’t require much attention, and see where your mind takes you. It could be right back to that special place you want to revisit.

You can tailor this playlist technique to what, specifically, you’re looking to remember. If it’s a summer vacation to a new place, try adding a mix of local songs and music that you listened to on your trip. If it’s an experience with a friend or loved one, throw on some songs you associate with that person. Whatever you choose, make sure it’s music that you enjoy and find pleasure in to maximize your chances of experiencing a MEAM.

This is just one example of an actionable, science-backed way to use sound in your health and well-being routine. Along with music therapy apps like Spiritune, “memory playlists” can be valuable tools for reinvigorating your mood and mindset using music.