Music `helps to cope with pain & stress`

London: Want to relieve pain or beat stress? Face the music, say scientists. A team at Glasgow Caledonian University in UK, which is carrying out the first detailed study into how contemporary music makes people feel, claims their findings could help turn tunes into medicine.

In fact, the results will provide a detailed guide to which types of tune could help combat pain, relieve stress and even beat depression, say the scientists. Dr Don Knox, who`s leading the research, said: "The impact of a piece of music on a person goes so much further than thinking a fast tempo can lift a mood and a slow one can bring it down. "Music expresses emotion as a result of many factors. These include the tone, structure and other technical characteristics of a piece. Lyrics can have a big impact too. "But so can purely subjective factors: where or when you first heard it, whether you associate it with happy or sad events. Our project is the first step towards taking on board all these considerations and the way they interact." The scientists have been playing a range of music to volunteers and asking them to mark on a graph how positive or negative it makes them feel. This is then matched to the loudness and speed of the music, the `Daily Express` reported. The three-year project aims to create a mathematical equation which explains how different types of music make people feel, say the scientists. PTI