Music for Anxiety

Now, we get to the final part: bringing it all together. With how much there is to consider every time you write a song, creating a blueprint to write a song for a specific use should make it easier, but there’s a lot of different elements to think about. From tempo, to instrumentation, to rhythm, melody, and harmony, it can get kind of overwhelming. So I’m mainly going to address what I think are the most important factors of creating a song to reduce anxiety. I believe the top three elements to consider are:

1. Tempo
2. Rhythm/Time Signature
3. Melody/Harmony

Following the generalized blueprint, your final song would contain: a slow tempo, with an even, simple rhythm, with simple chord progressions and an easy to follow along with melody. Your instrumentation doesn’t quite matter, nor do the lyrics. Of course, when reducing anxiety, happier lyrics or a happier-sounding chord progression and melody would work better than something that sounds sad or angry.

Music has been proven time and time again to be good not only for your mental health, but for your physical health as well. By interacting with multiple portions of the brain, music can reduce stress levels and lower anxiety. There are certain genres and styles of music that have been found to be more beneficial than others, and listening to those genres and incorporating them into your daily life can have both short-term and long-term positive effects, and reduce negative effects. By analyzing songs that have been found to be useful in reducing anxiety through music therapy, musicians can follow a basic blueprint to create their own songs to lower anxiety levels.

Hi, my name is Hannah Polissky and today I’ll be going into part of my research for my research project in my Music Technology Capstone class, which was titled Music for Anxiety. I wanted to look into why music is good for reducing anxiety. There have been a lot of studies that were done into it over the years, and I wanted to look specifically into what parts of music have been found to actually be the most useful in reducing anxiety. Through my research, I then created a blueprint for musicians and even non-musicians to follow if they wanted to create their own music. So, there are a lot of things to consider when creating music for anxiety. The top three, in my opinion, are tempo, rhythm and time signature, and melody and harmony.
So, for tempo, you want to have a slow tempo most of the time. Not all songs that have been found to reduce anxiety are that slow, but 60 BPM, as mentioned here, is one of the most useful to reduce anxiety, because it promotes synchronization in our brain, specifically with our brainwaves, and it causes alpha brainwaves, which are present when we are calm and relaxed, maybe a little sleepy, but still conscious. They are the brainwaves that are present before you fall asleep and get to level one and level two sleep.
When addressing rhythm and time signature, these are another integral part of music that helps to reduce anxiety. Time signatures, most of the time you’ll run into 4/4 or 3/4. These are very common ones and very easy and simple to look at, listen, play as well, and anything more complicated than that can sometimes just cause anxiety, even just by looking at it, let alone playing or listening to it. You want to have a consistent time signature and a consistent rhythm, because it allows people to really feel the beat of the songs and attune themselves to it, thus promoting that synchronization effect I mentioned before. Changing the time signature or the rhythm repeatedly introduces an anticipatory response and can actually increase levels of anxiety.
When looking at melody and harmony, these are also important to keep in mind, specifically because jarring melody or harmony that clashes with your key signature can actually make anxiety worse. You want to keep them simple and you don’t want to introduce any surprises. You want to keep them, again, calm, simple, just easy to follow along with. Chord progressions are another thing that you can be aware of. There’s common chords, which I’m not going to get into here, because that’s a little more complicated than just the general audience might understand, unless they have had a musical background.
Other factors to consider are the genre, the instrumentation, the key, and whether or not you want your song to be instrumental or have lyrics. The genre doesn’t really matter. You could have rock, and it could be very slow, very easy to follow along with. It could be a power ballad, it can be techno, whatever you want. That also addresses the instrumentation in that you could have really anything you want, as long as you’re aware of what that instrument does and how it will blend with everything else that you are including in your song. The key also doesn’t matter quite as much, but you do want to keep in mind if you’re trying to reduce anxiety, happier-sounding songs might be better for that. Having happier-sounding keys would be a good thing to keep in mind. And then, like I mentioned, if you want your song to have lyrics, just make sure that the lyrics aren’t super depressing. And then you can also just have it be completely instrumental with no lyrics at all.
And then your final product. You would want the final product to have a slow, even tempo, an even and simple rhythm, simple chord progressions, and a simple melody and harmony.