Investigating the Relationship between Therapeutic Music and Emotion: A Pilot Study on Healthcare Service

Life of modern people becomes more convenient and rich in material side but worse in mental side due to life stress. This results in bloom of some diseases such as insomnia. Listening to music could be one way to make people feel smooth. Some previous literature had advocated the efficiency of music therapy, however, only a few previous studies discussed and connected personal cognition (subjective indicators) with music features (objective indicators). Therefore, the aim of the study is to investigate what kind of music characteristics can spiritually relax people and obtain the therapeutic music from above results. Firstly, this study collected 25 different styles of music as samples. These songs were classified with Fuzzy C-Means clustering algorithm. According to our experimental result, music with mild amplitude, slow speed, and positive feelings can enable soothing in mind. The findings would also fit in with physiological signals (Heart Rate Variability) to ensure the consistency in psychology and physiology. This finding can provide suggestions on selection of therapeutic music. In addition, musicians can compose appropriate therapeutic music for patients of different mental illness.