Abstract This paper explores the feasibility of music therapy in alleviating students’ anxiety symptoms by comparing the effects of different audiovisual singing music therapies on the regulation of students’ anxiety states. The method of emotion calculation and exponential function is used to quantify students’ emotions, combined with the emotion matrix to express the degree of change of students’ emotions, and the cognitive map of music preference is constructed according to the prediction of students’ emotional state. Using emotion similarity matrix to determine the degree of music and student emotion matching available. Music recommendation methods were utilized to push music to anxious student groups, and the students’ music inclination degree was derived from the data. The effects of classical music and light music on students’ anxiety were also analyzed. The results showed that the only two categories of students’ music style tendency degree > 0.5 under anxiety were light music and classical music, and the music tendency degree was categorized as 0.823 and 0.797. The students’ anxiety scores were significantly lower than those before the intervention after the music intervention, with a T-value of 2.52, p<0.05. The difference between the scores of the Sleep Quality Scale and the pre-intervention was insignificant. Lower than that of the control group but the difference was not significant p>0.05, which indicates that music therapy can effectively relieve students’ anxiety.