Apple and Universal Music Announce 'Sound Therapy'

Apple and Universal Music Group today jointly introduced a new "Sound Therapy" collection of wellness playlists, consisting of popular songs with added sound waves or white noise to help listeners focus, relax, and sleep better.

Apple Music Sound Therapy
Sound Therapy features three categories: Focus, Relax, and Sleep. The playlists include extended, instrumental, and reimagined versions of popular tracks from artists such as Imagine Dragons, Katy Perry, Kacey Musgraves, and others.

The playlists were crafted by a team of producers, scientists, and audio engineers at Sollos, a music-wellness venture within Universal Music Group.

Apple's announcement explains further:

Songs have been enhanced with auditory beats or colored noise to help encourage specific brain responses. Gamma waves and white noise — a whoosh-like combination of every sound frequency — may help with focusing; theta waves could aid in relaxation; and delta waves and pink noise — a deeper, gentler variation akin to rain or wind — might assist in achieving better sleep. A dreamy version of Katy Perry's "Double Rainbow," for example, could help listeners drift off to sleep, while an Imagine Dragons track might help them tackle a to-do list.

The playlists are powered by Universal's proprietary audio technologies, and they are backed by scientific research, according to Apple.


"Sound Therapy harnesses the power of sound waves, psychoacoustics, and cognitive science to help listeners relax or focus the mind," says Apple's announcement.

Sound Therapy is available exclusively on Apple Music.

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Top Rated Comments

caliguy Avatar
8 months ago
Technology ruining your sleep? Try this technology.
Score: 24 Votes (Like | Disagree)
antiprotest Avatar
8 months ago
New New Age.
Score: 11 Votes (Like | Disagree)
poorcody Avatar
8 months ago
I'm surprised they didn't credit Artificial Intelligence being involved.
Score: 11 Votes (Like | Disagree)
ChittagongBoy Avatar
8 months ago
While we keep waiting for the manual EQ function on the iPhone/iPad.
Score: 10 Votes (Like | Disagree)
tennisproha Avatar
8 months ago
This is useless without a sleep timer in Apple Music. The system-wide timer is not a workaround, it needs to be a built-in timer like the Podcasts app.
Score: 8 Votes (Like | Disagree)
neuropsychguy Avatar
8 months ago

Wellness is a scam, a parody of health. Music is music. Medicine is medicine. May the two never meet.
Music in medicine: Monsalve-Duarte, Sofia, et al. "Music therapy and music medicine interventions with adult burn patients: a systematic review and meta-analysis." Burns 48.3 (2022): 510-521.

Music and sleep: Wang, Chun-Fang, Ying-Li Sun, and Hong-Xin Zang. "Music therapy improves sleep quality in acute and chronic sleep disorders: A meta-analysis of 10 randomized studies." International journal of nursing studies 51.1 (2014): 51-62.

Chen, Chia‐Te, et al. "Effect of music therapy on improving sleep quality in older adults: A systematic review and meta‐analysis." Journal of the American Geriatrics Society 69.7 (2021): 1925-1932.

Music therapy and pain: Hauck, Michael, et al. "The influence of music and music therapy on pain-induced neuronal oscillations measured by magnetencephalography." Pain 154.4 (2013): 539-547.

The science behind music therapy decent. It's been looked at for decades, with the general consensus that it can be beneficial for at least some conditions. Music can be healing, at least emotionally.

I'm not sure if there are randomized clinical trials specifically supporting the general claims behind these playlists of music, but this isn't completely out there.
Score: 7 Votes (Like | Disagree)