The relative contributions of subjective and musical factors in music for sleep

Previous research into music for sleep has focused on describing the types of musical characteristics associated with such music (Kirk & Timmers, in press; Scarratt et al., 2023). The current study aimed to increase understanding of sleep music by investigating subjective perceptions of listeners associated with music that is considered sleep inducing, including conceptualisations related to arousal, emotions, and distraction (Jespersen & Vuust, 2012). Musical features of the stimuli presented were extracted to compare the relative contribution of subjective and objective aspects. Our results reveal differing but important roles for valence and arousal, and highlight notions of comfort, liking, and dissociation that attribute to music that is most sleep inducing. The musical properties of sleep music conformed with previous research (Jespersen et al., 2022), with an additional emphasis on brightness (Kirk & Timmers, in press), however the subjective ratings overshadowed the musical features in predicting what music was most sleep inducing. Our findings have implications for how music used to facilitate sleep is selected and highlight the importance of personalisation.