SLEEPMUSIC

How does music affect sleep? The SLEEPMUSIC project aims to lay the foundations for personalised, data-driven research into this question. Where classical clinical studies reach their limits, this research project proposes to take a new direction: In the spirit of citizen science, a large, freely available dataset will be created through home studies.

Starting in 2025, we are looking for participants. If you are interested to take part in the SLEEPMUSIC study, please register your interest via our survey, at the link below. Feel free to also share this with others!

A principal limitation in previous audio-sleep studies has been the volume of data that could feasibly be collected; they are often subject to major practical constraints, due to the expense and inconvenience of inviting participants to a controlled sleep lab for multiple nights. Thus, past work has been limited to controlled small-scale studies, generally focused on specific groups (e.g. insomniacs). Additionally, data from clinical studies cannot usually be published. However, recent progress in mobile EEG hardware has made research-level sleep measurement devices, such as the Hypnodyne ZMax, accessible and suitable for home distribution.

Our project has two primary objectives of research. The first of these is to gather and publish a large dataset of sleep responses to musical stimulation, named the ‘Somnological Large ElectroEncephalographic Public Measurement of Underlying Sound-Invoked Causality Dataset’ (SLEEPMUSIC Dataset) and made open access for use in future fundamental and applied research. Our study will collect responses across a broad range of different circumstances (sleep stages, levels of stimulus exposure, participant sleeping habits etc.), through careful design of both the scheduling of auditory stimuli and the selection of participants. Unlike the majority of contemporary audio-sleep studies, we will use musical stimuli, rather than simpler sounds such as white noise.

The second purpose of our project is to lay the foundations for predicting the effects of a piece of music on the participant’s sleep quality with the help of intelligent data analysis, given its musical features. In doing so, we model the individual’s musical preferences during sleep. This is motivated by an expected interpersonal variability in sleep response to music, suggested both by the subjectivity of conscious music preference and by the variety present within available sleep music.

This project was made possible due to support from the DFG through Terra Incognita, a funding programme of the University of Stuttgart.

If you are interested in participating in the study, you may register this via our survey, at the link below. You can also contact us directly via e-mail (sleepmusic@ipvs.uni-stuttgart.de).