Your Favorite Song Might Make Pain Hurt Less

—Alberto Case—Getty Images No one much likes the pain of a needle stick at a doctor’s office or hospital.

But according to a new study in Frontiers in Pain Research , there’s one thing that can ease the sting: music.

Listening to just the right soundtrack may be its own kind of anesthetic—one that could be useful for needle insertions and other painful medical procedures.

“Although a needle puncture is a minor procedure, the level of pain can vary significantly from person to person,” said radiologist and lead author Dr.

Andrei-Cristinel Dragnea of University Hospital Zürich, in a statement that accompanied the release of the study.

“In modern medicine, the goal of treating physicians is not only to provide a successful diagnosis and therapy, but also to ensure that the procedure causes as little discomfort as possible.” To conduct their research, Dragnea and his colleagues studied 204 people who were undergoing an MRI of the brain, spine, head, or neck, and divided them into four groups.

One group listened to soft relaxation music similar to what’s played during a massage; one listened to a Mozart composition; one listened to their personal favorite songs; and the fourth, a control group, did not listen to music.

For the first three groups, the music was played before, during, and after the insertion of a cannula, which is a port-like tube slid into a vein for the purpose of administering medication, general anesthetic, or contrast dye before an MRI.

The Mozart music was not just any selection, but Sonata K488 , written for two pianos, in D major.

This song made headlines in 1993 when a study published in the journal Nature found that listening to classical music—and that composition in particular—was linked to improved memory, problem-solving, and spatial-temporal reasoning.

Though the mechanism involved wasn’t firmly established, the finding gave rise to what became known in science as the "Mozart effect.” The songs chosen by the group that listened to their favorite tunes included, among others, AC/DC’s Safe in New York City , Lionel Richie’s Hello , and the Crash Test Dummies’ Mmm Mmm Mmm Mmm .

People were asked to rate their pain before and after the cannula insertion.

Those who listened to the soft relaxation music or no music had no significant pain reduction before, during, or after the procedure.

There are possible reasons the lilting, generic music was ineffective.