Music at bedtime, involuntary musical imagery, sleep

https://doi.org/10.1177/0956797621989724

Explanation

This study states that listening to music before bedtime may reduce the quality of sleep.

To begin with, the study focused on earworms, involuntary musical imagery, on the assumption that most people listen to music before bedtime, and was designed to investigate whether listening to music affects sleep.

In Study 1, ( N = 199, mean age = 35.9 years) individuals who frequently listen to music reported an association between earworms during bedtime and sleep quality.

In Study 2, ( N = 50, mean age = 21.2 years), individuals were randomly assigned to listen to only instrumental music, usually popular songs, before bedtime and found that instrumental music increased the incidence of earworms during bedtime and worsened sleep quality as measured by polysomnography.

These studies also suggest that the experience of earworms occurs even while awake, and that the brain continues to process music even while sleeping.

Study 3 tested these results by showing a significant increase in frontal lobe slow oscillatory activity, a marker of sleep-dependent memory consolidation, and that some types of music may interfere with nighttime sleep by inducing long-term earworms that are perpetuated by spontaneous memory reactivation processes.

The study does not go into details on how long the earworm occurs, or how long before bedtime it does not affect us, but it suggests that we can reduce the earworm by writing down our thoughts on a piece of paper about 5 to 10 minutes before bedtime.

The author has over 20 years of experience with musical instruments, and his sleep quality was quite poor when he was working on his instrument, so this was an interesting study that I thought might have something to do with these things.