Prescription tunes: Can music help improve the effects of drugs?

If they can confirm the link between music and medicine processing, there would be wide-ranging applications, clinical pharmacologist Tony Kiang said. 

An Alberta clinical pharmacology professor is studying whether listening to music improves how our bodies metabolize medicine.

Music can affect concentrations of hormones, Tony Kiang says, and that many of those hormones are metabolized by the same pathways prescribed drugs are.

“It wasn’t difficult to make that connection and hypothesize that music should also have effects on how drugs get metabolized and cleared by the body,” he explained.

There’s also a personal connection: Kiang is surrounded by a family of musicians.

He applied for and was granted at least two years of federal funding from the New Frontiers in Research Fund-Exploration by the Tri-Council Agency. They were looking for projects that think outside the box and combine different disciplines.

Kiang will have healthy volunteers listen to already composed classical music — and original music — that has specific elements he believes will affect metabolism differently.

“We’re going to test, systematically, specific elements of music,” Kiang said.

“These elements include tempo, rhythm, harmony, auditory frequency and genres such as classical versus contemporary. We’re going to hire student composers to come up with music pieces tailored to the specific elements.”