Does music have the power to send us to sleep?

A recent experiment in Japan tested the power of music to send us into a deep slumber. Leo Lewis stayed awake to test the results.

Leo Lewis

To the casual eye, many features of everyday life seem destined to lull the Japanese to sleep: the steady rattle of a stuffy commuter train, the drone of a monotonous lecturer, the thrum of an office air-conditioner.

But the job of artificially persuading them to drift off into slumber turns out to be much more complicated. Give them pillows, blankets and bombard them with nearly three hours of drowse-inducing music and most will still be wide awake at the end of the show.

The audience at an extraordinary mass experiment in sleep-induction in Central Tokyo ten days ago is still not sure whether Dreams Kaimin - Kaimin is best translated as “good sleep” or “sound sleep” - was a success or not. It set out, under the supervision of one of Japan's most celebrated “sleep doctors”, to use the power of music to push 1,500 people into sweet oblivion. More than half simply enjoyed an entertaining night out at the theatre.

Certainly, there were plenty of people whose heads slumped on to their chins during the carefully arranged playlist of gentle classical and modern music, but then it is not uncommon to see Japanese concert-goers nodding off during Franz Ferdinand and Guns n' Roses concerts.

What has still not been established is whether the concert produced more than the natural quotient of snoozers, and whether those who did grab forty winks did so in record time. If there was one firm conclusion, said those whose shoulders became ad hoc pillows for their male neighbours, it was that a lot of men fell asleep as soon as the female vocalist began.

Two elderly men did not stir for two hours

Opening arrangements of Chopin and Tchaikovsky did not leave the audience any noticeably more heavy-headed after the first quarter of an hour. Better results were achieved a few minutes later when Aoi Teshima, the young female singer, ran through a quartet of popular Japanese numbers, Teru, Wishes, Rainbow and Rose, that sent the two elderly men on either side of me into a sleep from which they did not stir for another two hours.

Several audience members later queried the music choices. Most felt that Mary Hopkins's folk hit from the Sixties, Those Were The Days My Friend, was too interesting and popular to send them to sleep. A rendition of a well-known Japanese song by Masafumi Akikawa, the tenor soloist, was equally exhilarating. Many said they were too thrilled to hear a performance by the great Akikawa to waste the moment on slumber.

Yasuo and Yoshiko Abe, husband and wife participants in the experiment, went out of curiosity, they said, because they had never heard of a concert in which the audience was supposed to sleep. “Knowing that we were actually allowed to sleep made me relax and listen to the music without much feeling of trying to judge the quality of the performance,” Yasuo said. “In that sense, it's good. But being told that you can sleep also got me a little twisted mentally, and so I tried not to sleep.”

Selecting the right music

The brains behind Dreams Kaimin is Dr Takuro Endo, a neurologist who has made a science, and a lucrative CD business, out of selecting the right music to induce sleep. He divides it into three categories: melodies that fire the imagination; those that are calming and relaxing; and music that should, within ten minutes, slow the brain down to the point of unconsciousness. Do not, he cautions, listen to the third category when you're driving. In his limited laboratory experiments, Dr Endo honed a playlist from that third category down to a smaller collection, most of which was played to the Tokyo audience.

Japan's relationship with sleep has always been a complicated one. For instance, the Japanese appear able to sleep anywhere, at any time: low crime rates make people feel especially secure about drifting off on public transport.

But a good night's sleep has been the victim of the country's so-called economic miracle, the long phase of growth in which Japan was propelled from a post-war mess to Asia's most sparkling modern economy. Long hours and the demands of the all-consuming corporate lifestyle have come at the expense of sleep.

Now, as the economy struggles to come to terms with what it has matured into, the Japanese are decreasingly happy at the imposition of the office. Several “napping rooms” have sprung up in Tokyo's main business districts so workers can sleep in their lunch break without the shame of being seen by their colleagues.

Leo Lewis is the Times Asia Business correspondent

The Science of Sleep and Music

Simon Crompton

Tastes vary According to Professor Jim Horne, the director of the Sleep Research Centre at Loughborough University, music helps people to sleep because it helps them to relax. Generally, children find gentle music lulling, but in adults different music will prove relaxing for different people. CDs of music marketed on the grounds of curing insomnia will work for some, but not others, Horne says. “The secret is to find anything that gives your brain peace of mind.”

Brain music Research from the University of Toronto has suggested that a CD of your brain waves converted into music can help you to sleep. Researchers recorded people's brain waves as they fell asleep, and then converted them into sound. The research subjects listened to the recordings each night for 30 days and fell asleep three times faster than people listening to other people's brain waves.

Didgeridoos Creating music before you go to bed may also induce sleep. A 2006 study in the British Medical Journal concluded that playing a didgeridoo before bed helped people with sleep apnoea to nod off. “Blasting away on an instrument might help you to get rid of troubling emotions before you go to sleep,” Horne says.

The top ten tunes to help you drift of

Saku, Susumu Yakota

Nocturne, Chopin

Piano Concerto no 1, Tchaikovsky

Eine kleine Nachtmusik, Mozart

Pachelbel, Canon in D

Rose, Aoi Teshima

By This River, Brian Eno

Pie Jesu, John Rutter

Albatross, Fleetwood Mac

Divertimento No. 2 in D Major, Mozart

Original here