![Study Identifies Acoustic Features of Healing Music](http://media.assettype.com/healthday-en%2F2023-12%2F06ac0d03-ac67-4aa2-88cf-a6d42959798e%2FAdobeStock_469234628.jpg?w=480&auto=format%2Ccompress&fit=max)
FRIDAY, Dec. 22, 2023 (HealthDay News) -- There are three potentially unique acoustic features of healing music that transcend genre, according to a study published online Dec. 19 in General Psychiatry.
Yue Ding, Ph.D., from the Shanghai Jiao Tong University School of Medicine, and colleagues identified and validated distinctive acoustic features of healing music. The analysis included a healing music dataset of 165 pieces.
The researchers found that 74.59 percent of acoustic features shared commonalities across genres, while 26.22 percent significantly differed between the healing music dataset classical pieces and the classical music dataset. The healing and five-element music datasets did not differ significantly in 9.46 percent of the features. The standard deviation of the roughness, mean, and period entropy of the third coefficient of the mel-frequency cepstral coefficients were identified as the potential healing-distinctive acoustic features. Using these features, jazz pieces from the healing music dataset could be distinguished from those of the jazz music dataset. Furthermore, these three features could significantly predict both subjective valence and arousal ratings in the Chinese affective music system.
"Music therapy is a promising intervention for various mental health issues, especially via the internet, but the selection of appropriate therapeutic music can be challenging, particularly in emergency situations," the authors write. "The findings of this study have implications for the development of music recommendation systems and artificial intelligence models capable of automatically identifying therapeutic music."