Investigating the Physiological and Psychological Effect of an Interactive Musical Interface for Stress and Anxiety Reduction

Music is a powerful tool for managing negative affect, due to its portability, accessibility, and unique ability to impact mood. In an effort to explore uses of personalized music as an anxiety management intervention, we designed an interface featuring 14 novel musical fragments with adjusted tempo, instrumentation, and rhythm and allowed users to navigate freely. We conducted a pilot study to test the efficacy of this approach for reducing stress and anxiety. Through survey and biometric data, we found that our approach can effectively reduce stress when enabling participants to personalize their musical stimuli. This suggests significant value for conducting larger-scale studies, prompting us to present our findings to support future work toward building personalized musical interventions that alleviate symptoms of stress and anxiety.