Reportedly the largest heavy metal music festival in the world, Germany’s Wacken Open Air in Schleswig-Holstein boasts a sprawling scope, including a music camp for aspiring youngsters, medieval and post-apocalyptic themed spaces, and even “Metal Yoga.” And now, as of this month, it’s also become the site of a successfully peer-reviewed medical study.
Neuroscientists with the Max Planck Institute for Human Cognitive and Brain Sciences tested a cohort of 122 confirmed metalheads (in true headbanger fashion) for their ability to endure pain. The experiment, conducted on-site at Wacken Open Air in 2023, monitored a control group of 60 participants one day ahead of the festival and 62 test subjects three or four days later as they, in the study’s words, placed “their non-dominant hand and forearm into cold water for as long as they can tolerate it.”
After adjusting for outside variables—e.g., excluding concert-goers under the influence of alcohol and accounting for participants’ history with chronic pain—the results were promising: Enjoying a few days of live metal, it seems, may help boost one’s tolerance for pain.
“The intense musical experience over several consecutive days at the metal festival did not have a negative effect on how the study participants experienced pain,” Lydia Schneider, who undertook the project as a doctoral researcher at the institute, said in a statement. “On the contrary—the festivalgoers were actually able to endure the cold-induced pain for longer than the control group.”
Stare into death and be still
While some studies have explored the connection between a person listening to their favorite music and pain release (a phenomenon known as “music-induced analgesia”), prior research on metal’s effects have only really been done via self-reported surveys. Cognitive scientist Tom Fritz, who worked with Schneider on the new study, said their findings could have a real impact on actual patients one day.
“This is certainly relevant for the group of chronic pain patients, because in a clinical context, music is often used to trigger positive feelings and induce relaxation—but when it comes to letting out one’s anger, you don’t necessarily want to listen to relaxing music,” Fritz said in a statement.
Across genres, past research has linked the body’s natural release of the soothing “love hormone” oxytocin to music enjoyment and pain relief. But, the researchers argued, some of the values stereotypical of metal fans as a subculture might have also contributed to this process.
“[Accepting] unpleasant emotional states or difficult situations plays a central role in being resilient and in tolerating pain instead of masking unpleasant emotions,” Schneider and Fritz wrote in their study, published this month in Scientific Reports. “It may be worth noting that this aligns with common themes in metal music, which often expresses difficult emotions and life challenges, avoiding attempts to mask them with happiness.”
Words that go unspoken, deeds that go undone
Schneider and Fritz undertook serious efforts to reduce uncertainty in their study—using G*Power planning tools, for example, to find the minimum sample size that would ensure their work was statistically significant. But, the pair noted, plenty of factors outside their control would need to be studied before anyone could rightly claim that metal holds any unique power for people managing physical pain.
Other experimental pain tests, like those measuring tolerance for heat or pressure, might yield different results, they noted. Similarly, duplicate experimental runs at music festivals with other genres might bolster the idea that oxytocin release might have been the more defining factor than thrashing metal tunes.
But some facets of the experiment still lean dramatically in metal’s favor. Test subjects reportedly still felt the pain, for example, with no evidence of “improved emotional processing, as indexed by heart rate variability,” the researchers wrote.
“This seems to suggest that they became more resilient, which means that they may have accepted the unpleasant sensations associated with the pain experience to a greater extent and focused on the factors they could influence themselves,” Schneider said.
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