Music

Hundreds of randomised trials have tested listening to music or working with a music therapist, and the pooled results are consistently positive for self-reported anxiety — before surgery, during chemotherapy, in intensive care — with smaller effects on pain and mood. The structural weakness is unavoidable: you cannot blind someone to whether music is playing, so expectation accounts for an unknown share of every result, and the trials are small and highly varied in what they actually played. The 1990s claim that listening to Mozart raises intelligence did not replicate and is not what this literature supports.

Reviewed 2026-09-20

Official sources

How this list was built

We searched Europe PMC for English-language papers published since 2010 whose title contains “music therapy” or “music intervention” or “music listening”, kept meta-analyses, systematic reviews and randomised trials, then ranked them by study design first, then recency and citations. Retracted papers are removed.

Open a paper to read its abstract and ask for an AI brief of what it found.