February 2, 2025 • 15 mins
Michael Monks kicks off hour two with a humorous reflection on aging before diving into groundbreaking research from UC Irvine’s Dr. Sean Young. Together, they explore how mindful listening to improvisational jazz may dramatically reduce chronic musculoskeletal pain, with potential implications for AI-enhanced treatment in the future.
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Episode Transcript
Available transcripts are automatically generated. Complete accuracy is not guaranteed.
Speaker 1 (00:00):
You're listening to KFI AM six forty on demand, KFI.
Speaker 2 (00:05):
AM six forty live everywhere on the iHeartRadio app. I'm
Michael Monks from KFI News. We're here with you till
eight thirty tonight, and then we have a half hour
special Los Angeles Wildfires, Look for the Helpers. It highlights
the incredible individuals and organizations tirelessly providing support during the
LA wildfires and the aftermath. It's an all in one
(00:26):
resource offering vital assistance to those in need. That's coming
up at eight thirty. I took last weekend off, celebrated
a birthday in Palm Springs with some friends from Kentucky
who came out to hang with me. It was a
great time. Palm Springs is always great. But I'm another
year older, and I am at an age where I
still feel young. Like I was playing Mario Party Jamboree
(00:49):
this afternoon. That's not an old guy activity. But also, yeah,
I feel slower. Let's say, I need to be more
methodical when I pick up something off the floor. I
have to hope I don't pull a back muscle when
I have a sneeze. So I feel youthful most of
the time, but I'm also popping a lot of ibuprofriend
during the day. But there may be another way to
(01:12):
deal with our pain as we get older, and I
know we're all looking for that. Maybe it's stretching more,
getting more exercise, staying active. But what about listening to jazz.
Some are searchers at UC Irvine just released a study
on improvisational jazz and how it can ease pain. It
focuses on what they call mindfulness based intervention and the
(01:34):
concept that listening to music with focus may reduce chronic pain.
The study was conducted by doctor Sean Young, a professor
in u SEE Irvine's Departments of Emergency Medicine and Informatics.
He's also executive director of the University of California Institute
for Prediction Technology. He joins us now, doctor Young, thank
you for being with us today.
Speaker 3 (01:54):
How are you, Thank you, I'm doing great, Thanks for
having me here.
Speaker 2 (01:58):
I'm assuming you are completely pain free.
Speaker 3 (02:01):
I fortunately am pain free myself.
Speaker 2 (02:05):
I'm curious how how does any research like this come about?
Where you think, let's see what the impact that mindful
jazz might have on people with chronic pain and anxiety.
Speaker 3 (02:16):
It's an interesting story and it goes back to college
where I studied eth new musicology, which is music from
around the world. I studied it at UCLA and I
noticed while I was playing music and I love that
major bathery. It was amazing. And noticed in my jazz
studies that the jazz musicians that I with khom I played,
(02:41):
they were very relaxed and very in the moment. And
there was my bass teacher and he would talk about
playing music from the heart. He could say, you know,
play if you hear it like float eat up. But Bob,
you know that's the way you got to play it.
You got to play it from your heart. And so
I want it back then to do a study looking
(03:04):
at if we assign I was also taking psychology classes,
and if we assign people to listen to jazz, will
they experience jazz the way jazz musicians play it? And
so for those who don't have a background on jazz
improvisational jazz, the song may be the same every time
(03:24):
they play it, like a famous song all the Things
you Are or out of Leaves if you heard of those,
But each time a jazz musician will play it, they'll
play it differently. Because they play how they're feeling in
the moment. So if they're feeling sad, they might play
it more sad. If they're feeling happy, they might play
it more happy. And I wanted to see if people
(03:47):
listening to it could be able to listen so attentively,
so closely, that they could be able to feel and
experience those emotions the way the musicians were playing it. Well,
long story short, applaud with that for grad school and psychology.
Ended up going to Stanford, where they don't do anything
like that, and so studied something completely different. But years
(04:09):
down the line, the National Institutes of Health is now
interested in studying the effects of music on health. And
I had been doing all kinds of different digital interventions
on different areas like HIV and chronic pain and mental health,
and thought, now to the time where I get to
(04:30):
be able to go back to my original grad school
application and try to study the effects of jazz. And
we started doing it in different areas. One of them
is to help our chronic pain patients.
Speaker 2 (04:41):
Okay, I'm curious what type of chronic pain are we
talking about where you've seen an impact related to listening
to this kind of music.
Speaker 3 (04:49):
Yeah, so these are chronic musculoskeletal pain patients, so patients
who have pain, joint pain and and muscular pain, things
like that, and this type of research we have seen
the effects. I'm going to tell you about it. But
this is really innovative, first of its kind type research.
(05:14):
So so when you say where we have seen this,
this work around jazz has not been done before. Just
as a background, there have been a bunch of studies
on music that have taken place over over the years. Typically,
what they do, you know, for a number of reasons,
they assign people and say, listen, you know, we believe
(05:35):
music can be helpful for people, so go listen to music,
listen to whatever music you want. And they find that
having people listen to music or listen to nature sounds,
things like that helpful in different areas, pain being one
of them. As an ethno musicology student in someone who's
played music, and I worked in the music industry at
(05:57):
guests and Interscope records back in the day with signing
bands and things. So as someone interested in the technical
parts of music and music theory, I wanted to study
more specifically type what is it within sounds or within
music that we might be able to learn to help
(06:19):
improve people to help And so one of the areas
we started with is jazz. Going back to, like I said,
that initial interest that I have as an undergraduate, but
this is something no one has ever as far as
we know, assigned people to listen to jazz because usually
it's not at the level of the musical genre or
(06:42):
types of chords or rhythms or things like that. But
that's what I'm interested in studying. So this is all
really novel and new and super exciting.
Speaker 2 (06:50):
Then you focused on what has been called improvisational jazz,
As you said, I guess where the song may be
a familiar song but played in a different way, even
by the same artist in a different setting, each time
that they approached the song. This specific type of music
is important because of what I guess you will have
called the potential unpredictability and unfamiliarity of this So was
(07:15):
it effective on folks who may not have turned to
this kind of music even for just regular musical enjoyment
before it is?
Speaker 3 (07:23):
So what we wanted to do was we wanted to
combine some alternatives for chronic pain. So a typical treatment
for chronic pain involves medication opioids, which we know there
are risks that come with opioids and for a number
of reasons where we the public health in medical field
(07:43):
is trying to limit the amount of opioids being prescribed.
So there are other alternative therapies, complimentary therapies that can
take place. One of them is mindfulness. So mindfulness typically
involves teaching people how to breathe and experience their pain
in different ways and be more present. And the research
(08:04):
around mindfulness has been great in showing that it reduces pain.
But not everyone can participate in mindfulness for a bunch
of reasons.
Speaker 2 (08:12):
And we'll talk about those reasons when we continue Jazz
music and its potential to ease your pain.
Speaker 1 (08:19):
You're listening to KFI AM six forty on demand.
Speaker 2 (08:24):
KFI AM six forty Live everywhere on the iHeartRadio app
bym Michael Monks from KFI News. We're with you till
eight thirty tonight. We've got that special program coming up
LA Wildfires, Look for the Helpers. It's a look at
the people and organizations providing support during the fires and
now during the aftermath. But first let's continue with doctor
Sean Young researcher from UC Irvine whose new study shows
(08:47):
a possible correlation between improvisational jazz music and making your
physical pain better. Before we went to break, doctor Young,
you were explaining how being mindful while listening is important
to help with the pain, but not everyone is good
at shutting off their brains and really focusing.
Speaker 3 (09:04):
It can be difficult for them to do. It can
be boring for them. We know they're often high dropout
rates from mindfulness. Even though apps like Calm and Headspace
are popular to download, people don't keep using them, and
especially with chronic musculo skeletal patients, that breathing, we've found
can actually be painful for them to do. So we
(09:27):
wanted to provide an alternative where people could practice that
mindfulness but do it through music. So combining those two
things of the improvisational jazz and mindfulness, we wanted to
see who we come up with some other way of
allowing people to be mindful in a way where they
don't have to sit down in a corner by themselves
(09:50):
in a yoga studio and breathe for an hour. They
can just you know, walking along with their headphones on
or in the car, be able to practice mindfulness by
listening music and jazz. So what we did we took
four groups because we wanted to compare not just to jazz,
but allow people to listen to their own music whatever
they wanted. We took four groups, two of them control groups.
(10:13):
So in studies it's important to have a control group
to know what are some other reasons why people might
their pain may have changed. So we had people and
either taught them about music, either their own choice of
music or taught them about jazz. And then the other
(10:34):
two groups we taught them how to mindfully listen to
whatever their preference of music was or for jazz. So
four different groups, total of one hundred and twenty people,
thirty in each group, and they were called randomly assigned
so that we know that the outcomes should They were
(11:00):
randomly assigned to make it so that everyone coming in
is equal. So then the study took place for four weeks.
They were first trained, they got a twenty minute training.
The two of the groups who learned about music history
where watched a video on music history. The other two
(11:20):
groups who were taught about mindfulness were taught about how
to mindfully breathe and then how to mindfully listen to music,
and then they were encouraged. They were given these sets
of recordings. The groups who picked their own music, they
listened to their own style of music. And the groups
who were assigned to listen to jazz, we gave them
(11:43):
four different weekly playlists and jazz along with some games
that we created, like try listening to the walking bassline
that goes to Doom Doom, Do Do Do, Do, Do do,
and see if you can follow that.
Speaker 2 (11:56):
But give giving that kind of specificity allows folks to
practice mindfulness, maybe even without realizing they're doing it.
Speaker 3 (12:03):
Yeah exactly. I mean to me, I've been meditating on
an auctions high school, and to me, that's what allows
me to do it. To make it fun, hone in
on an instrument and just see if you can follow it,
and the chat and so leading to by week four,
the real challenge of can you follow a trumpet or
(12:26):
you know, can you follow Charlie Parker, can you follow
you know, John Coltrane, someone who's really difficult to you know,
and so, but being able to follow that mindfully, if
we could treat teach people how to do that, then
(12:48):
it may be able to take their mind off the pain,
and I was a goal and ultimately that's what we found.
We found that in the music in the mindful music groups,
the group's where we taught them how to mindfully listen
to music compared to the groups where we just taught
them about music education. We found both immediately after the training,
(13:12):
from before to after, as well as throughout the four weeks,
we found reductions and pain. Now, we found that in
both of the both of the mindful music groups, so
whether you're listening to music that you want or jazz.
But we found even stronger effects than pain reduction in
the jazz group, which was so exciting and you know,
(13:34):
I had hooked for it, but since there was no
research on this background before, I didn't expect it and
really excited by it.
Speaker 2 (13:41):
So, doctor Young, you've got a foot in academia and
music and medicine. Can we expect big pharma to start
buying those record labels?
Speaker 3 (13:52):
Oh? Well, we are, I mean, and I do a
lot of work around most of my works technology. So
my students, we are with generators AI. We're coming up
with some things about how to see if we can
create some kind of clinical playlists and incorporate AI into it,
(14:14):
and so I think farmers should be looking out. It's
going to take some time because this is all really
novel and takes a while for research to get ready
and to get proven. But I think this is some
of the future of it, that we'll be able to
listen to some clinical playlists to help us and provide
an alternative to medicine.
Speaker 2 (14:35):
All right, Doctor Sean Young, the author of this study
related to helping to ease pain through listening to improvisational
jazz at u See Irvine, Thank you so much for
taking some time to chat with us. We do appreciate it.
Congratulations on your findings.
Speaker 3 (14:49):
Thank you so much.
Speaker 2 (14:50):
That was doctor Sean Young, a professor in you See
Irvine's departments of Emergency Medicine and Informatics. He's also executive
director of the University of California Institute for Prediction technolog
That study has been published in the medical journal Curious.
And that's it for us this week. We're ending early
to make way for the special on the LA wildfires.
I'm Michael Monks from KFI News. I'm back with you
(15:12):
all week with the headlines Monday through Friday, and next
Saturday with more chat about Los Angeles at seven o'clock
in the evening. We'll see you then.
Speaker 1 (15:20):
KFI AM six forty on demand
You're listening to KFI AM six forty on demand, KFI.
Speaker 2 (00:05):
AM six forty live everywhere on the iHeartRadio app. I'm
Michael Monks from KFI News. We're here with you till
eight thirty tonight, and then we have a half hour
special Los Angeles Wildfires, Look for the Helpers. It highlights
the incredible individuals and organizations tirelessly providing support during the
LA wildfires and the aftermath. It's an all in one
(00:26):
resource offering vital assistance to those in need. That's coming
up at eight thirty. I took last weekend off, celebrated
a birthday in Palm Springs with some friends from Kentucky
who came out to hang with me. It was a
great time. Palm Springs is always great. But I'm another
year older, and I am at an age where I
still feel young. Like I was playing Mario Party Jamboree
(00:49):
this afternoon. That's not an old guy activity. But also, yeah,
I feel slower. Let's say, I need to be more
methodical when I pick up something off the floor. I
have to hope I don't pull a back muscle when
I have a sneeze. So I feel youthful most of
the time, but I'm also popping a lot of ibuprofriend
during the day. But there may be another way to
(01:12):
deal with our pain as we get older, and I
know we're all looking for that. Maybe it's stretching more,
getting more exercise, staying active. But what about listening to jazz.
Some are searchers at UC Irvine just released a study
on improvisational jazz and how it can ease pain. It
focuses on what they call mindfulness based intervention and the
(01:34):
concept that listening to music with focus may reduce chronic pain.
The study was conducted by doctor Sean Young, a professor
in u SEE Irvine's Departments of Emergency Medicine and Informatics.
He's also executive director of the University of California Institute
for Prediction Technology. He joins us now, doctor Young, thank
you for being with us today.
Speaker 3 (01:54):
How are you, Thank you, I'm doing great, Thanks for
having me here.
Speaker 2 (01:58):
I'm assuming you are completely pain free.
Speaker 3 (02:01):
I fortunately am pain free myself.
Speaker 2 (02:05):
I'm curious how how does any research like this come about?
Where you think, let's see what the impact that mindful
jazz might have on people with chronic pain and anxiety.
Speaker 3 (02:16):
It's an interesting story and it goes back to college
where I studied eth new musicology, which is music from
around the world. I studied it at UCLA and I
noticed while I was playing music and I love that
major bathery. It was amazing. And noticed in my jazz
studies that the jazz musicians that I with khom I played,
(02:41):
they were very relaxed and very in the moment. And
there was my bass teacher and he would talk about
playing music from the heart. He could say, you know,
play if you hear it like float eat up. But Bob,
you know that's the way you got to play it.
You got to play it from your heart. And so
I want it back then to do a study looking
(03:04):
at if we assign I was also taking psychology classes,
and if we assign people to listen to jazz, will
they experience jazz the way jazz musicians play it? And
so for those who don't have a background on jazz
improvisational jazz, the song may be the same every time
(03:24):
they play it, like a famous song all the Things
you Are or out of Leaves if you heard of those,
But each time a jazz musician will play it, they'll
play it differently. Because they play how they're feeling in
the moment. So if they're feeling sad, they might play
it more sad. If they're feeling happy, they might play
it more happy. And I wanted to see if people
(03:47):
listening to it could be able to listen so attentively,
so closely, that they could be able to feel and
experience those emotions the way the musicians were playing it. Well,
long story short, applaud with that for grad school and psychology.
Ended up going to Stanford, where they don't do anything
like that, and so studied something completely different. But years
(04:09):
down the line, the National Institutes of Health is now
interested in studying the effects of music on health. And
I had been doing all kinds of different digital interventions
on different areas like HIV and chronic pain and mental health,
and thought, now to the time where I get to
(04:30):
be able to go back to my original grad school
application and try to study the effects of jazz. And
we started doing it in different areas. One of them
is to help our chronic pain patients.
Speaker 2 (04:41):
Okay, I'm curious what type of chronic pain are we
talking about where you've seen an impact related to listening
to this kind of music.
Speaker 3 (04:49):
Yeah, so these are chronic musculoskeletal pain patients, so patients
who have pain, joint pain and and muscular pain, things
like that, and this type of research we have seen
the effects. I'm going to tell you about it. But
this is really innovative, first of its kind type research.
(05:14):
So so when you say where we have seen this,
this work around jazz has not been done before. Just
as a background, there have been a bunch of studies
on music that have taken place over over the years. Typically,
what they do, you know, for a number of reasons,
they assign people and say, listen, you know, we believe
(05:35):
music can be helpful for people, so go listen to music,
listen to whatever music you want. And they find that
having people listen to music or listen to nature sounds,
things like that helpful in different areas, pain being one
of them. As an ethno musicology student in someone who's
played music, and I worked in the music industry at
(05:57):
guests and Interscope records back in the day with signing
bands and things. So as someone interested in the technical
parts of music and music theory, I wanted to study
more specifically type what is it within sounds or within
music that we might be able to learn to help
(06:19):
improve people to help And so one of the areas
we started with is jazz. Going back to, like I said,
that initial interest that I have as an undergraduate, but
this is something no one has ever as far as
we know, assigned people to listen to jazz because usually
it's not at the level of the musical genre or
(06:42):
types of chords or rhythms or things like that. But
that's what I'm interested in studying. So this is all
really novel and new and super exciting.
Speaker 2 (06:50):
Then you focused on what has been called improvisational jazz,
As you said, I guess where the song may be
a familiar song but played in a different way, even
by the same artist in a different setting, each time
that they approached the song. This specific type of music
is important because of what I guess you will have
called the potential unpredictability and unfamiliarity of this So was
(07:15):
it effective on folks who may not have turned to
this kind of music even for just regular musical enjoyment
before it is?
Speaker 3 (07:23):
So what we wanted to do was we wanted to
combine some alternatives for chronic pain. So a typical treatment
for chronic pain involves medication opioids, which we know there
are risks that come with opioids and for a number
of reasons where we the public health in medical field
(07:43):
is trying to limit the amount of opioids being prescribed.
So there are other alternative therapies, complimentary therapies that can
take place. One of them is mindfulness. So mindfulness typically
involves teaching people how to breathe and experience their pain
in different ways and be more present. And the research
(08:04):
around mindfulness has been great in showing that it reduces pain.
But not everyone can participate in mindfulness for a bunch
of reasons.
Speaker 2 (08:12):
And we'll talk about those reasons when we continue Jazz
music and its potential to ease your pain.
Speaker 1 (08:19):
You're listening to KFI AM six forty on demand.
Speaker 2 (08:24):
KFI AM six forty Live everywhere on the iHeartRadio app
bym Michael Monks from KFI News. We're with you till
eight thirty tonight. We've got that special program coming up
LA Wildfires, Look for the Helpers. It's a look at
the people and organizations providing support during the fires and
now during the aftermath. But first let's continue with doctor
Sean Young researcher from UC Irvine whose new study shows
(08:47):
a possible correlation between improvisational jazz music and making your
physical pain better. Before we went to break, doctor Young,
you were explaining how being mindful while listening is important
to help with the pain, but not everyone is good
at shutting off their brains and really focusing.
Speaker 3 (09:04):
It can be difficult for them to do. It can
be boring for them. We know they're often high dropout
rates from mindfulness. Even though apps like Calm and Headspace
are popular to download, people don't keep using them, and
especially with chronic musculo skeletal patients, that breathing, we've found
can actually be painful for them to do. So we
(09:27):
wanted to provide an alternative where people could practice that
mindfulness but do it through music. So combining those two
things of the improvisational jazz and mindfulness, we wanted to
see who we come up with some other way of
allowing people to be mindful in a way where they
don't have to sit down in a corner by themselves
(09:50):
in a yoga studio and breathe for an hour. They
can just you know, walking along with their headphones on
or in the car, be able to practice mindfulness by
listening music and jazz. So what we did we took
four groups because we wanted to compare not just to jazz,
but allow people to listen to their own music whatever
they wanted. We took four groups, two of them control groups.
(10:13):
So in studies it's important to have a control group
to know what are some other reasons why people might
their pain may have changed. So we had people and
either taught them about music, either their own choice of
music or taught them about jazz. And then the other
(10:34):
two groups we taught them how to mindfully listen to
whatever their preference of music was or for jazz. So
four different groups, total of one hundred and twenty people,
thirty in each group, and they were called randomly assigned
so that we know that the outcomes should They were
(11:00):
randomly assigned to make it so that everyone coming in
is equal. So then the study took place for four weeks.
They were first trained, they got a twenty minute training.
The two of the groups who learned about music history
where watched a video on music history. The other two
(11:20):
groups who were taught about mindfulness were taught about how
to mindfully breathe and then how to mindfully listen to music,
and then they were encouraged. They were given these sets
of recordings. The groups who picked their own music, they
listened to their own style of music. And the groups
who were assigned to listen to jazz, we gave them
(11:43):
four different weekly playlists and jazz along with some games
that we created, like try listening to the walking bassline
that goes to Doom Doom, Do Do Do, Do, Do do,
and see if you can follow that.
Speaker 2 (11:56):
But give giving that kind of specificity allows folks to
practice mindfulness, maybe even without realizing they're doing it.
Speaker 3 (12:03):
Yeah exactly. I mean to me, I've been meditating on
an auctions high school, and to me, that's what allows
me to do it. To make it fun, hone in
on an instrument and just see if you can follow it,
and the chat and so leading to by week four,
the real challenge of can you follow a trumpet or
(12:26):
you know, can you follow Charlie Parker, can you follow
you know, John Coltrane, someone who's really difficult to you know,
and so, but being able to follow that mindfully, if
we could treat teach people how to do that, then
(12:48):
it may be able to take their mind off the pain,
and I was a goal and ultimately that's what we found.
We found that in the music in the mindful music groups,
the group's where we taught them how to mindfully listen
to music compared to the groups where we just taught
them about music education. We found both immediately after the training,
(13:12):
from before to after, as well as throughout the four weeks,
we found reductions and pain. Now, we found that in
both of the both of the mindful music groups, so
whether you're listening to music that you want or jazz.
But we found even stronger effects than pain reduction in
the jazz group, which was so exciting and you know,
(13:34):
I had hooked for it, but since there was no
research on this background before, I didn't expect it and
really excited by it.
Speaker 2 (13:41):
So, doctor Young, you've got a foot in academia and
music and medicine. Can we expect big pharma to start
buying those record labels?
Speaker 3 (13:52):
Oh? Well, we are, I mean, and I do a
lot of work around most of my works technology. So
my students, we are with generators AI. We're coming up
with some things about how to see if we can
create some kind of clinical playlists and incorporate AI into it,
(14:14):
and so I think farmers should be looking out. It's
going to take some time because this is all really
novel and takes a while for research to get ready
and to get proven. But I think this is some
of the future of it, that we'll be able to
listen to some clinical playlists to help us and provide
an alternative to medicine.
Speaker 2 (14:35):
All right, Doctor Sean Young, the author of this study
related to helping to ease pain through listening to improvisational
jazz at u See Irvine, Thank you so much for
taking some time to chat with us. We do appreciate it.
Congratulations on your findings.
Speaker 3 (14:49):
Thank you so much.
Speaker 2 (14:50):
That was doctor Sean Young, a professor in you See
Irvine's departments of Emergency Medicine and Informatics. He's also executive
director of the University of California Institute for Prediction technolog
That study has been published in the medical journal Curious.
And that's it for us this week. We're ending early
to make way for the special on the LA wildfires.
I'm Michael Monks from KFI News. I'm back with you
(15:12):
all week with the headlines Monday through Friday, and next
Saturday with more chat about Los Angeles at seven o'clock
in the evening. We'll see you then.
Speaker 1 (15:20):
KFI AM six forty on demand
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