Can Music Ease Loneliness? Researchers to Measure Impact

A project to measure and more broadly test the mental and physical benefits of music using the latest technology will launch this spring in Osaka.

Led by an initiative from Sumitomolife Izumi Hall in Osaka, the effort brings together leading experts across fields including neuroscience and information engineering. The team aims to make visible and scientifically validate music's medium-to long-term health effects, while proposing new value, such as using music in preventive care.

The project will apply technologies such as smartwatches and facial-recognition cameras to track data, including heart rate and shifts in emotion from before a performance through after it ends. Researchers will also examine whether regular listening changes indicators such as sleep quality over time.

What Music Already Does to the Body

It is already well established that listening to music can promote relaxation by shifting the body toward parasympathetic nervous system dominance. In other words, the body's "rest-and-digest" mode, which slows the heart rate and quiets the stress response.

What this project hopes to add is a more layered reading of the data, bringing perspectives from information engineering and medicine to bear, to "define new effects of music on mind and body," the organizers say. They also want the findings to speak to a broader policy challenge: easing the fiscal strain of rising medical costs in an aging society.

*Osaka Symphony Orchestra performs Maurice Ravel's The Child and the Spells at Sumitomo Life Izumi Hall (Provided by Osaka Symphony Orchestra).*

Testing Two Generations of Listeners

The study will focus on two groups: younger listeners, from middle school to university age, and seniors. Starting in April 2026, about 150 students at Osaka Metropolitan University will attend concerts at the hall while their responses are measured. Researchers will also compare data from residents at eldercare facilities that host regular performances with those at facilities that do not.

The length of the measurement period and the scale of additional participant groups will depend on funding. Organizers plan to release findings on a rolling basis, using the interim results to attract corporate partners and raise research support.

The Team Behind the Experiment

The project has assembled a lineup spanning music, medicine, and technology. It includes Kazuki Sawa, former president of Tokyo University of the Arts.

Kenji Ohata, a neurosurgeon and emeritus professor at Osaka Metropolitan University, is also taking part. Koichi Kise, who leads the Japan laboratory at the German Research Center for Artificial Intelligence and teaches at Osaka Metropolitan University, is another member.

The group also includes Hitoshi Imaoka, a Nippon Electric Company Fellow and a researcher in facial-recognition technology.

Pooling their expertise and the latest tools, the group has spent the past year and a half refining the plan and debating how to make it work. Participants say the mix is unusually strong. "We've got people at the very top of their fields," one member said. "It's exciting to see what we'll learn."

Beyond Prevention: Purpose and Community

Ohata argues the project could also challenge a familiar assumption. "We need to move away from the idea that you can stay healthy simply by taking medicine or supplements," he said.

The listening sessions will start with a heavy focus on classical music. Over time, Sawa said, the team hopes to broaden the scope. "If we can eventually see how the effects differ by genre, that would be valuable," he explained.

Project members say the goal isn't only to get people to listen to music on their own for the sake of their health. They also hope concerts and other events can build community, and, in doing so, help counter loneliness.

Loneliness has been flagged as a factor that can harm both mental and physical health. Naoki Kondo, a professor of social epidemiology at Kyoto University's graduate school, said he hopes the research will deliver insights "from a public-health perspective."

Performance, he added, is also a form of self-expression and can give people a sense of purpose. If the project can test benefits that extend beyond disease prevention, he said, "it could widen the ways music can be put to use."

(Read the article in Japanese.)

Author: Saori Fujii, The Sankei Shimbun