Research Confirms: Spiritune Improves Mood and Performance In 10 Minutes Or Less

When Pablo Ripollés, PhD, the associate director of New York University’s Music and Auditory Research Laboratory, first learned of Spiritune’s work to share music that could modify mood, he was skeptical. “We are always skeptical,” Ripollés says of himself and his colleagues. “We’re scientists; that’s our job.”

So, as any good researchers would do, they came up with an objective study design that would put the platform to the test. They compared Spiritune to other forms of music, measuring their impacts on mood and cognition using the precision of the scientific method. 

After nearly four years of work, the resulting randomized controlled study, Effects of Music Advertised to Support Focus on Mood and Processing Speed, was just published in the peer-reviewed journal PLOS One. Let’s peek behind the curtain to learn how this research came together, what it found, and why it’s so significant for the field of music medicine.

Measuring music’s impact on mood

For this study, healthy adults across the U.S. were asked to listen to one of four types of audio for 10 minutes: 

• A Spiritune “Work Flow” track: Composed to take listeners from feeling anxious to feeling energized
• Spotify’s “Deep Focus” playlist: A popular collection of light, ethereal, ambient songs
• Popular music: Songs (with lyrics) from Billboard’s Hot 100
• Office noise: A simulation of the background sounds in a typical office environment

Due to COVID restrictions (this research started back in 2021), participants listened virtually instead of coming into the lab. Before they pressed play, they took a mental health assessment survey, and then answered survey questions about their positive and negative affect to estimate their mood heading into the listening session.

In the middle of the ten minutes, they completed a “flanker task”—a common research test that measures attention and cognitive processing speed.

Once the audio stopped, participants took the survey again to see if their mood had changed over the ten minutes. They also answered questions about whether they enjoyed the music they had listened to.

After analyzing the results, Ripollés and his co-authors found that listening to Spiritune’s Work Flow music increased positive affect (e.g., feelings of strength, enthusiasm, and determination) and decreased negative affect (e.g., feelings of stress, anxiety, and irritation) significantly more than office noise and the other forms of music that were tested.

In fact, Spiritune’s Work Flow music was the only music to significantly improve mood, he explains, and 76% of listeners experienced either an increase in positive affect, a decrease in negative affect, or a combination of both after listening to it. The Spiritune Work Flow group also completed the cognitive test faster, without losing any accuracy, whereas the other forms of music either slowed task performance over time or had no effect. 

Unpacking the findings

Ripollés wasn’t necessarily surprised that lyrical pop music didn’t improve mood or cognitive speed in this study. He explains that people have different preferences when it comes to these songs, and Daniel Bowling, Ph.D.— the neuroscience advisor at Spiritune, incoming assistant professor at Stanford School of Medicine and a co-author of the research—adds that distracting lyrics can be “like poison” when you’re trying to focus (at least if the work you're doing involves language processing).

However, Ripollés expected the Spotify Deep Focus playlist—which has been saved over 4.75 million times—to have more of an impact. “This is a popular playlist for a reason,” he’d figured. “People like it and people use it.” In the end, although participants rated this music positively, they didn’t experience any significant mood or cognitive changes after listening to it.

Bowling theorizes that this has to do with Deep Focus tracks’ acoustic structure. They are relatively simple sonically and they don’t have much rhythm. They’re designed to be pleasing to listen to, but their benefits might start and end there. “There are all these playlists online that claim to support focus, attention, or task performance but there’s really not even a whiff of logic behind how they do this,” he says. 

The Spiritune Work Flow track, on the other hand, was methodically designed to promote energy and focus using a slightly faster tempo and more groove (which, in musicology, describes the extent to which music makes you want to dance or move). These elements seem to drive the track’s ability to both improve mood and speed up performance, but more research is needed to be sure. 

"What we think is happening is this music is likable so it’s making people feel better and also it’s keeping people engaged because it has this groove,” Ripollés says. “We think it’s a combination of these two things but we need more data.” 

While preliminary, this research underscores a critical point: not all therapeutic music is created equal. The scientific and clinical construction of music can make all the difference in its ability to improve mood and maximize productivity. Jamie Pabst, founder of Spiritune, says “this study validates what we’ve always believed in: music needs to be purposefully created, scientifically grounded, and clinically tested to truly impact mental health. Spiritune music is intentionally designed using key features that science has shown to be effective for emotion and cognition, and this study demonstrates what's possible when music, science and technology combine in an intentionally therapeutic way. Spiritune represents the next frontier in mental health interventions by turning music into medicine.”

The future of science-backed music medicine

We’ve all had the experience of sitting at a computer, eyes glazed over, struggling to complete a monotonous task. Music may help us power through these moments more quickly and feel better as we do it, this new study suggests. However, not just any song or playlist will do the trick: Music that’s specifically designed to support on-task functioning, like Spiritune, will likely be most effective.

Bowling notes that, in an age when the medical field is struggling to curb the growing mental health crisis, music can serve as an accessible, low-cost, and highly effective alternative therapy. He envisions a world in which everybody has access to tracks that are scientifically shown to help them reach specific goals—be it breaking out of a negative thought pattern or focusing at work.

“It will take time to get there,” he says, “but this research definitely takes us a step closer.”