Music may improve subjective sleep quality for adults with insomnia

Listening to music may have a moderate to large beneficial effect on sleep quality in different populations experiencing insomnia symptoms. Limited conclusions can be drawn on the effect of music listening on other aspects of sleep or on related physiological and psychological aspects of daytime function, since few trials reported these outcomes.

Subjective measures suggest participants may experience improvements in sleep‐onset latency, total sleep time and sleep efficiency with the music intervention, with broad confidence intervals ranging from small to large effect sizes.

All included trials used music that was characterised as sedative or relaxing. However, these included a number of different musical styles (eg, classical, new age, jazz), and, at this point, it is not clear if some types of music may be more effective than others. There was no difference in the effect on sleep quality between trials using researcher‐ selected music and those giving the participants a choice among several preselected music types.