Relaxation music for stress alleviation: Exploring relationships of audio features and listener profiles

Stress is an increasingly prevalent state experienced by many individuals, but mood regulation and relaxation can alleviate some of its associated symptoms. While music listening has generally been shown to support stress alleviation, less is known about how individual differences potentially guide the choice of music for this purpose. The present study focused on depression and anxiety as individual differences that might relate to the selection of relaxation music. Through an online questionnaire, 93 participants provided ~20 minutes (median number of tracks per participant = 6) of self-selected relaxation music and completed questionnaires measuring depression, anxiety and previous use of music for mood regulation and adaptive functions. We compared Spotify audio features of the relaxation music to general music and found that relaxation music had higher levels of Acousticness and lower levels of Speechiness, Energy, Valence, Liveness, Instrumentalness, Danceability and Loudness. Through clustering, we identified three subgroups of relaxation music (i.e., ‘loud-energetic-danceable’, ‘neutral-acoustic’ and ‘mellow-instrumental’). Finally, results showed that higher depression scores increased the likelihood of selecting relaxation music from the ‘loud-energetic-danceable’ cluster over the remaining two, while higher anxiety scores increased the likelihood of selecting music from the ‘mellow-instrumental’ cluster over the ‘loud-energetic-danceable’ cluster. Previous use of music for mood regulation, but not adaptive functions, also predicted music selection for relaxation. This research advances our understanding of how different individuals use music to reduce stress and relax and provides guidance on how music can adaptively cater for these purposes.