Study finds solo music listening boosts social well-being

Posted by PaulHoule 3/31/2025

Study finds solo music listening boosts social well-being(phys.org)

287 points | 120 commentspage 2

euvitudo 4/4/2025|

My birds are much happier when music is playing. And they seem to have preferences over time. Like there are no predators around when the environment around them is noisy.

khalladay 4/4/2025|

Though I found they like having control over whether the music is playing more... to my chagrin. I tried to keep my parrot from being too noisy through the day by setting up a microphone in his room, and having it turn off the radio for 30 seconds every time he was louder than a threshold amount.

Day one -> he triggered the shut down ~10 times. Day two -> easily 50. Day three -> you can see where this is going

Dude freaking LOVED being able to turn on and off the radio. It almost beat out being able to flap his wings and make the curtains move as one of his favourite hobbies.

em-bee 4/5/2025||

you thought you were punishing him by taking away the music if he makes to much noise and you give him a tool that gives him control over his environment. seems that backfired because it looks like the parrot is less interested in the music itself but in this new ability to control the radio.

riyanapatel 4/4/2025||

I can't argue that I really enjoy music as my working background noise. Something else unique is I enjoy listening to TV shows, or more, "noise". I usually put on a simple TV show I've seen before that doesn't need a lot of attention (Friends, the Office, New Girl, Big Bang Theory), that creates that background noise. It's like white noise to me :)

ssttoo 4/4/2025||

Confusing title, I thought there was something special in solo music, e.g. pieces for one piano or a single classical guitar

stronglikedan 4/4/2025||

If you want to know if this is for you, but you don't want to spend a lot of money, start with iems. It's quite the hobby, as well as education. It's very cheap and accessible to start off, while getting the full hi-fi music feeling. Of course, if you stick with it, it can get very expensive.

replete 4/5/2025|

For a while I switched to mee6 pro's with some squishy foam cushions, they were around £30 and had a surprisingly flat response. Of course, that will sound bad to a typical listener until you realize the v curve you are used to has been hiding details in the midrange

_fat_santa 4/4/2025||

Just from personal experience, listening to music in the morning while I make my coffee is an essential part of my morning routing, to the point that I will be upset if I can't do it.

Pixelious 4/4/2025||

Another study that states obvious facts. Of course listening to music boosts your well-being, heck, doing anything you enjoy doing tends to do so.

tonytamps 4/4/2025||

Not sure if your response was deliberately obtuse or not, but in case it was accidental I wanted to point out that you may have missed a key word - "social" well-being.

It's one thing if listening to music makes you feel good, but another completely if listening makes you more capable of socialising. This may be more important for others than it is for you.

tananan 4/4/2025||

You are reading into something that isn't there. The study doesn't have to do with music making you more capable of socializing.

The hypothesis being tested is that in the absence of social interaction, people will turn to surrogates in order to make up for the perceived lack. Specifically, they test if music can be such a surrogate. They do some surveys and a kind of silly experiment to provide evidence that yes- it can.

The reason it is rightly called pointless is that it brings nothing actionable to the table.

You cannot extract advice from showing evidence for a common-sense observation: If you feel a certain lack, activities you find pleasurable can diminish that lack.

And look at the experimental setup: They make people play an online game with others where certain people are excluded from playing. It turns out that people who are hyped from listening to their favorite song found this less jarring, hence showing that music can be a "social buffer", i.e. make up for a perceived social exclusion.

Let everyone individually conclude how insightful this experiment is.

EDIT: Misunderstood the nature of the "Cyberball" experiment, fixed

bluGill 4/4/2025||

Until it doesn't. It is an obvious fact that a heavy rock will fall faster than a light rock. Only because you have been taught otherwise for all your life do you realize it isn't a fact even though it is obvious.

syeare 4/6/2025||

WHAT?! Given a lack of air resistance (i.e. ideal conditions in a vacuum), they should fall at the same rate

1718627440 4/6/2025||

Depends on whether you are talking about an abstract physics model or actually existing rocks on earth. (And actually gravitational force is proportional to both masses.)

dimal 4/4/2025||

This is a cynical take, but I’m increasingly becoming tired of studies like this. Is this is where our science funding is going? It’s clever, trite, and probably meaningless. I keep reading about the publish/perish problem in academia and how it encourages research that safe, slightly interesting, but not too interesting, and doesn’t move anything forward. This study seems to fit that criteria.

And since it’s behind a paywall, I can’t really determine the how the study was designed, how well powered it is, how they defined statistical significance, and exactly how they justify their conclusion. But it got clicks and comments, so I guess it served its purpose, only to be quickly forgotten in endless churn of popular science news.

I’m sad to say, I’m beginning to think that a lot of current science is bullshit. As a very pro-science person, this is very depressing.

Eddy_Viscosity2 4/5/2025||

I really wanted to read the article and then comment "in mice!", but alas, they used humans.

rramadass 4/5/2025||

Everybody here is missing the point of this article which is actually about the increasing need for "Social Surrogates" in our current times. Music is just one of them.

See Social Surrogates, Social Motivations, and Everyday Activities: The Case for a Strong, Subtle, and Sneaky Social Self - https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/S00652...

ThinkBeat 4/4/2025|

The study found that for people who are lonely or sad, listening to music helped them.

Wow. How utterly expected.

Next, they will do studies and find that people who are lonely or sad, are helped when they attend a concert with their favorite band.

Or when they eat their favorite food.

"After two years of studies, we conclude that people who are feeling lonely or sad, eating their favorite food gives them a boost and feel better".

The metric that would be useful is "better" for how long?

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