A Breathing Sonification System to Reduce Stress During the COVID-19 Pandemic.

Bavo Van Kerrebroeck,Pieter-Jan Maes

doi:10.3389/fpsyg.2021.623110

Abstract

Since sound and music are powerful forces and drivers of human behavior and physiology, we propose the use of sonification to activate healthy breathing patterns in participants to induce relaxation. Sonification is often used in the context of biofeedback as it can represent an informational, non-invasive and real-time stimulus to monitor, motivate or modify human behavior. The first goal of this study is the proposal and evaluation of a distance-based biofeedback system using a tempo- and phase-aligned sonification strategy to adapt breathing patterns and induce states of relaxation. A second goal is the evaluation of several sonification stimuli on 18 participants that were recruited online and of which we analyzed psychometric and behavioral data using, respectively questionnaires and respiration rate and ratio. Sonification stimuli consisted of filtered noise mimicking a breathing sound, nature environmental sounds and a musical phrase. Preliminary results indicated the nature stimulus as most pleasant and as leading to the most prominent decrease of respiration rate. The noise sonification had the most beneficial effect on respiration ratio. While further research is needed to generalize these findings, this study and its methodological underpinnings suggest the potential of the proposed biofeedback system to perform ecologically valid experiments at participants' homes during the COVID-19 pandemic.

Highlights

The COVID-19 pandemic has impacted mental health globally (Torales et al, 2020)
Our starting point thereby was the idea that stress can be reduced, and relaxation increased by modulating breathing patterns demonstrated by earlier research
We proposed the use of music and sound to effectuate spontaneous breathing pattern adaptation toward these goal states rooted in their combined arousal (Nilsson, 2009; Hunter and Schellenberg, 2010; Bergstrom et al, 2014) and synchronization effects (Maes et al, 2019)

Summary

Introduction

The COVID-19 pandemic has impacted mental health globally (Torales et al, 2020). Studies of previous pandemics show that during times of a pandemic, people exhibit fear and anxiety-related distress responses (Taylor, 2019). Music has shown its potential to reduce stress and anxiety in patients under hospital care through its facility to modulate arousal levels, regulate moods and by distracting patients from the experience of pain (Nilsson, 2009; Hunter and Schellenberg, 2010). Such music therapy has shown significant benefits as a support intervention to Sonified Breathing to Reduce Stress reduce stress and improve well-being in clinical staff working with COVID-19 patients (Giordano et al, 2020). Given the demonstrated flexibility of musical practitioners to adapt to these changes (Schiavio et al, 2021), distance-based musical interventions and methods for well-being and education could compensate for some of lost interpersonal interactions as well as create new ones (Philippe et al, 2020)

Objectives

Methods

Results

Conclusion