AI-driven proactive music therapy in the era of digital mental health

Digital technologies such as telepsychology, mobile health applications, artificial intelligence (AI), and immersive virtual environments are rapidly transforming the delivery of psychological care. Despite these advances, music therapy remains weakly integrated into most digital mental health systems. In many current interventions, including virtual reality therapies and mental health applications, music is typically used as background ambience rather than as an active therapeutic mechanism. This disconnect limits the potential of music-based interventions for emotional regulation and psychological support. Advances in artificial intelligence create new opportunities to address this gap. Through emotion recognition, behavioral data analysis, and generative music algorithms, AI systems can anticipate emotional states and deliver adaptive musical interventions before psychological distress escalates. Such AI-driven proactive music therapy enables music to function as an embedded regulatory component within digital mental health ecosystems rather than as a passive environmental feature. A conceptual framework for integrating proactive music therapy into digital mental health platforms is proposed, highlighting key technological components including emotion sensing, adaptive music intelligence, and digital therapeutic delivery. Ethical considerations and research priorities for AI-enabled music interventions are also outlined. AI-driven proactive music therapy may represent an important direction for scalable and personalized psychological care in the era of digital mental health.