The next time you feel pain, listen to your sad song playlist to feel better

Listening to favourite songs can help lessen pain intensity and unpleasantness, a study finds. — dpa

FROM Johnny Cash’s late-life cover of Nine Inch Nails’ Hurt to Christina Aguilera’s eponymous 2006 hit or REM’s cigarette lighter-hoister Everybody Hurts, pain – usually the emotional kind – is an evergreen trope in music.

But music can at the same time be a palliative, an aural painkiller, according to research done at the Roy Pain Lab at Montréal’s McGill University.