Should You Meditate to Music, or Sit in Silence?
You press start. Rain fades in, or a piano, or something that sounds like a cello left in a cathedral. Five minutes later it fades out and you get on with your day.
Somewhere in the back of your mind is a doubt. Was the sound the point, or the packaging? And a second doubt behind it: proper meditators sit in silence, so is the music a kind of cheating?
Both doubts are answerable. The research on music and stress is large, older than the app industry, and more interesting than either side of the argument expects.
Does music on its own reduce stress?
Yes, and not by a little.
A Dutch team has pooled this twice. The first time, in 2020, they ran two multilevel meta-analyses covering 104 randomised trials, 327 effect sizes and 9,617 participants. They separated how people felt from what their bodies did. Music interventions reduced psychological stress with an effect of d = 0.545, and physiological stress with an effect of d = 0.380. Both significant, the first moderate.
The useful detail is in the moderator analysis. The effect was largest on heart rate, d = 0.456, smaller on blood pressure, d = 0.343, and smaller again on hormone levels, d = 0.349. Which is to say the body responds fastest where it responds fastest anyway: the beat, the breath, the immediate stuff.
So the sound behind your session is not decoration. On its own, with nobody meditating at all, it moves measurable things.
Now the counterweight. The same group later pooled 47 studies of music therapy with 2,747 participants and found a larger overall effect, d = 0.723. But they also tested what the effect depended on, and the answer was familiar. Effects were larger in the less rigorous study designs, and larger against waiting lists than against usual care or against other stress-reducing interventions.
Read that last clause slowly. Music beats nothing comfortably. Measured against another plausible thing to do, the gap narrows. Every field in this literature has the same shape.
What happens when you test music against meditation directly?
This is the question that matters, and somebody ran it properly.
In 2022 researchers at the University of Southern Denmark recruited 623 employees from Danish companies and randomised them three ways: 30 days of app-based mindfulness, 30 days of app-based music listening, or nothing. Ten minutes a day. Everyone was measured before and after on perceived stress and on two cognitive tasks, one for sustained attention and one for working memory.
On stress, it was close to a tie. Perceived stress fell in the mindfulness group with an effect of d = 0.67, and in the music group with an effect of d = 0.6. The control group did not change. In the authors' own summary, meditation produced a 43% reduction in perceived stress and music produced a 38% reduction.
Then the groups separated.
On sustained attention, the meditators improved with an effect of d = 0.8. The music group improved too, but by less than half as much, d = 0.3. At the end of the month the meditators were significantly better than the music group on that task.
On working memory, the meditators improved with an effect of d = 0.95. The music group did not change at all, p = 0.67. Neither did the controls.
One study, app-based, with volunteers who signed up and a control group that was given nothing to do. Do not treat it as the final word. But the pattern it found is a clean one, and it fits everything above: music is a good way to feel calmer, and it is not what trains your attention.
That is worth holding onto if you use a meditation app. The sound is not the active ingredient. You are.
So is silence better?
Sometimes, and for a reason you can almost feel.
In 2006 a cardiorespiratory lab in Pavia put 12 practising musicians and 12 matched controls through six styles of music while recording breathing, blood pressure, heart rate, cerebral blood flow and baroreflex. Then they did something clever. They dropped a two-minute pause into the sequence at random.
Faster tempi and simpler rhythms pushed ventilation, blood pressure and heart rate up. The pause pushed heart rate, blood pressure and minute ventilation down, below the resting baseline recorded before any music played at all.
The deepest relaxation in the study came not from the music but from its absence.
The authors' reading is that music is first an arousal, driven mainly by tempo, and that slow music can relax you while a pause relaxes you more. Twenty-four people in a laboratory is a small study, and it measured minutes, not months. It is still the cleanest demonstration that sound is never neutral. It is always doing something to your breathing.
Does it matter which sound?
It does, and the difference shows up fast.
A 2025 crossover study gave 53 healthy adults ten minutes of a nature-based soundscape and ten minutes of a calm coffee shop recording, in random order, with a short washout between. The comparison is the strong part: not sound against nothing, but one pleasant sound against another.
During the nature soundscape, breathing slowed from 14.4 to 13.2 breaths a minute, roughly one breath less, and heart rate fell from 70.7 to 69.0 beats a minute. Both differences were statistically clear. The study's primary measure, a heart rate variability index called RMSSD, only just cleared significance at p = 0.048 with a very small effect size of d = 0.1.
So the honest version is narrow. Ten minutes of the right sound slows your breath by about a breath a minute, more than another nice sound does. The authors also disclose that two of them founded the company whose soundscape was tested, which is worth knowing when you read the enthusiasm in the conclusion.
Should you use your own playlist?
Probably not necessary.
A randomised trial in La Réunion tested exactly this. 174 women waiting for gynaecological surgery were randomised to 20 minutes of either a personal playlist they had built themselves or a predetermined playlist from an app. Anxiety fell in both groups, by 5.5 points on the state anxiety scale for the personal playlist and 7.2 for the app's. There was no significant difference between them.
Your favourite album is not required. If anything, there is a reason to be suspicious of it. The music you love is music you will listen to, and listening is attention, and attention spent on a chord change is attention not spent on your breath. That last step is my inference, not a finding, but it follows from the two studies above: tempo arouses, and sound did not train attention.
What does this mean for five minutes?
The sound has three honest jobs. It masks the room you are in. It marks the time so you know the sit is running. And it lowers the cost of starting, which is the only part of this that determines whether you are still doing it in March.
None of those jobs is the meditation. If you are noticing the music, the music has become the object of your attention, and the practice is whatever is left over.
That gives you a simple test for any Soundscape. Can you stop hearing it? Good sound for a sit is sound you forget inside the first minute.
One thing to do today
Run the same five minutes twice, on two days, at the same point in your day.
Day one, keep your usual sound, and turn it down until you stop noticing it is there. In this app that is the Mix, and the Soundscape layer goes all the way down to nothing, which makes a silent timed sit a real option rather than a punishment.
Day two, take the sound off entirely and sit with the room.
Then answer one question, not about which felt deeper, but about which one you finished without reaching for your phone. The evidence above says the sound is not doing your meditating for you. What it can do is make the Daily Five easy enough to start. Keep whichever version you will still be starting next week.
Sources
This article shares general information about meditation research. It is not medical advice. If you have concerns about your mental health, talk to a qualified professional.
Five minutes. Every day. That is the whole app.