The sheer number of supposedly ‘tried and true’ methods for getting to sleep and staying asleep probably exceed the number of people who have difficulty doing just that. There always seems to be something else to try – a new fad or the like. One method that hasn’t been a temporary trend is listening to music before and during bedtime. The kinds of music or sounds preferred depends on the individual.
The thing is, even if listening to a favorite song or album before bed manages to work for one, it is not an across-the-board solution. The reasons why one song makes a person able to sleep versus not another could be for a number of reasons: nostalgia, tempo, vocal aesthetic, or compositional repetition to name a few possibilities. Still, this leaves the problem of vast personal preference and matching vastness of composition form.
Scientists and researchers in Winston-Salem, North Carolina at the Wake Forest Baptist Medical Center may have a musically-involved method of sleep induction that won’t require matching genre and artists. In a press release from November 20, the medical center formally announced information about the study on insomnia that they conducted, which according to the press release, was originally
published online in October, advance of print, in the journal Brain and Behavior. [The study] was funded by a $26,696 grant from Brain State Technologies, LLC [in] Scottsdale, AZ, [which is] the company that owns the technology used in the study.
Putting the study and its technology succinctly, the essential focus of examination for a cause behind insomnia was the brain and the working relationship of its two hemispheres. Dr. Charles H. Tegeler, who was the study’s head investigator and is a professor of neurology at the medical center explained that,
when a person undergoes trauma or a major stressor, their autonomic survival responses kick in and the brain can become unbalanced. If those imbalances persist, symptoms such as insomnia can result.
The researchers at Wake Forest looked to resolve these internal imbalances using melodic tones in conjunction with Brain State Technologies’s process called HIRREM (high-resolution, relational, resonance-based, electroencephalic mirroring). The idea is that the brain’s hemispheres gain a sense of equilibrium when its own energy, in the form of frequencies, are turned back onto itself with HIRREM’s melodic tones. The tonal selection process does involve some element of personalized attention, though not of the artistically stylized sort. The tone(s) used for study participants were determined through an objective algorithm and the unique “dominant frequency” in the mid-range of each person’s individual EEG frequency spectrum.
Presently, the study appears to have produced a notable, positive change with participants’ problems of insomnia, based on participants’ decreased points on the Insomnia Severity Index but Dr. Tegeler is aiming to do a second study that will incur less uncertainty, due to elements like: a small study group and inclusion of what the press release is calling, “non-specific mechanisms,” used with the tonal mirroring.
Kira is an old school music nerd with a love for all things creative; always searching for music’s common ground. She graduated with an M.A. in Performing Arts Administration from New York University. Drop her a tweet @shadowmelody1
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