Your Favorite Song May Dull the Sting of an IV Needle, Study Finds

For millions of patients, the most dreaded moment of a hospital scan is not the loud, claustrophobic tube of the MRI machine itself but the small needle that must first slip into a vein. A new clinical study from University Hospital Zürich suggests that the soundtrack playing in the background at that moment may matter far more than anyone expected. In a prospective trial of 204 adults scheduled for elective MRI examinations, patients who listened to their own favorite music reported significantly lower pain after intravenous cannulation than patients who heard nothing at all, while a generic relaxation track did essentially nothing. The findings, published in Frontiers in Pain Research, add a strikingly practical twist to the science of music-induced analgesia: what you listen to may matter as much as whether you listen at all.

The research team, drawn from neuroradiology, diagnostic radiology, psychiatry, intensive care, and the Zürich University of the Arts, set out to answer a question that has nagged the field for decades. Music is well established as a non-pharmacological adjunct for anxiety, stress, and chronic pain, with documented benefits in intensive care units, stroke rehabilitation, epilepsy, and rheumatology. Yet there has never been a consensus on which genre works best for a specific clinical situation. Some studies have used self-selected favorite songs, others classical composers, heavy metal, or live performance, and results have been inconsistent. The Zürich group chose a deliberately mundane but universally familiar painful event: the peripheral intravenous cannula inserted before contrast-enhanced MRI.

Between October 2024 and June 2025, the researchers recruited 223 outpatients scheduled for brain, spine, or head and neck MRI requiring contrast injection. Nineteen dropped out for technical or patient-related reasons, leaving 204 participants aged 17 to 83, 107 women and 97 men, in the final analysis. Patients were assigned in rotating chronological order to one of four groups: the first part of the first movement of Mozart’s Sonata KV 448, performed by Alfred Brendel and Walter Klien; a personally chosen favorite song; a relaxation piece called Source of the I Am by Peter Uwe Piotter; or no music at all. The authors are candid that this allocation was a pseudo-randomization dictated by clinical routine rather than true randomization, a limitation they flag repeatedly.

The favorite-music playlist alone makes the study worth reading. Patients brought everything from Mozart’s Lacrimosa and Vivaldi’s Four Seasons to AC/DC’s Hells Bells, Michael Jackson’s Bad, Adele’s Someone Like You, Indian pop, Swiss folk music, trance, and progressive metal by the band Tool. Each participant completed questionnaires covering medical history, the Hospital Anxiety and Depression Scale, and musical background, then rated current pain on a Visual Analogue Scale from 0 to 10 before entering the scanner. Music was already playing when patients entered the MR room, delivered through speakers at a volume calibrated to pleasant background level, and continued through the cannulation and the final pain rating.

Once positioned on the MRI table, each patient received an intravenous cannula from one of five trained technicians, usually in the antecubital fossa at the elbow. Most punctures used the smallest 22-gauge cannula, and all but one succeeded on the first attempt. Pain was then rated verbally at three time points: immediately after the needle stick, roughly 30 seconds later, and again at two minutes. Because the ratings occurred before image acquisition began, the researchers note, the deafening noise of the MRI scanner itself did not contaminate the measurements.

The statistical design hinged on a subtle problem. Patients who report no pain at baseline cannot report less than zero afterward, so any apparent benefit of music could be masked by this floor effect. The team therefore ran two repeated-measures analyses of variance: one including all 204 patients, and a second restricted to the 71 patients who reported baseline pain persisting for at least 48 hours. An analysis of covariance additionally adjusted for sex, age, body mass index, pathology, and chronic pain status. No between-group differences emerged in weight, height, BMI, age, sex, handedness, chronic pain, or treating technician, and neither BMI, technician, nor cannula size influenced pain perception.

The results were unambiguous for favorite music. Compared with the silent control group, patients listening to their own chosen songs reported significantly lower pain both 30 seconds and two minutes after puncture, whether the analysis included everyone or only those with baseline pain. In the baseline-pain subgroup, the favorite-music effect was even stronger, appearing immediately after the puncture itself. Mozart produced a more nuanced picture: across all patients there was only a non-significant trend toward lower pain at two minutes, but among patients who arrived with existing pain, the sonata significantly reduced pain at two minutes and showed borderline significance at 30 seconds. The relaxation track and the silent control showed no effect at any time point.

The authors interpret this pattern as evidence that the fabled Mozart effect, first described by Rauscher and colleagues in 1993 as improved spatial task performance after listening to Sonata KV 448, may depend on the listener’s starting state. In this study, the benefit of Mozart emerged only in patients who were already in pain, while favorite music helped across the board. The researchers also observed a time-dependent effect: pain reduction grew stronger with each successive measurement, peaking at two minutes. They propose a combination of mechanisms, including activation of emotional processing through limbic and prefrontal networks, endogenous pain inhibition that takes minutes to engage, cognitive distraction, and the simple fact that the sharp discomfort of the needle dominates attention in the first moments after the stick.

Why did the relaxation music fail? The authors suggest the answer may lie in accessibility and dynamics. Their chosen piece was monotonous and of constant low volume, possibly ignored entirely by listeners unfamiliar with the genre. Mozart’s sonata, by contrast, is cheerful and dynamic with a faster tempo, making it more effective at drawing attention away from pain. Favorite music has the additional advantage of deep personal familiarity, making it easy and inviting to follow. The team also notes that the MRI setting itself, with its tight bore, fixed head coil, and the anxiety of awaiting diagnostic results, likely elevated stress in all groups, and that music’s benefits may extend beyond pure pain relief to downregulation of the autonomic nervous system and the hypothalamus-pituitary-adrenal stress axis.

The authors conclude that music deserves a place in minor painful procedures performed in uneasy settings, such as intravenous cannulation before MRI, with favorite music as the first choice and Mozart’s KV 448 as a reasonable alternative for patients with baseline pain. They suggest that patients sensitive to stress or prone to claustrophobia might even benefit enough to reduce the need for relaxing medication. But they are careful to temper the excitement: the Mozart finding is exploratory, the baseline-pain subgroup was small, the puncture pain was mild, and the pseudo-randomized design demands confirmation in larger, truly randomized trials that also test more intense pain. For now, the practical takeaway is refreshingly simple. The next time a nurse reaches for a cannula, it may be worth asking what is playing in the room, and whether the patient would rather hear something else.

Subject of Research: The effect of different music genres on short-term pain perception during intravenous cannulation before MRI

Article Title: Effect of music on short-term pain perception during peripheral intravenous cannulation

Article References: Dragnea, A. C., Michels, L., Fellner, T., Christou, A., Brandi, G., Bicciatto, G., Ludovichetti, R., Frauenfelder, T., Kulcsar, Z., & Garcia Alzamora, M. (2026). Effect of music on short-term pain perception during peripheral intravenous cannulation. Frontiers in Pain Research, 7, Article 1923943. https://doi.org/10.3389/fpain.2026.1923943

Image Credits: AI Generated

DOI: 10.3389/fpain.2026.1923943

Keywords: music therapy, pain perception, intravenous cannulation, Mozart effect, MRI, visual analogue scale, non-pharmacological pain relief, favorite music, relaxation music, clinical study, Sonata KV 448, needle pain