Hale, Hearty, And Horny: Sonos And Apple Study Tests If Music Matters

Could listening to Beyoncé make food taste better, streaming Slipknot make you more frisky, or slapping on Paul McCartney's greatest hits make your kids do chores? Turns out the answer might be yes to all three, with Sonos bankrolling a scientific study into the effect of music on home life.

The research – performed in association with Apple to mark the arrival of Apple Music on Sonos' connected speakers today – was carried out by neurologist Dr. Daniel Levitin, who wrote "This is Your Brain on Music" as well as helping various bands with their music and even consulting with the US Navy on audio.

For the Sonos experiment, an initial survey of 30,000 people across eight countries pared the sample cohort down to thirty homes. For a week in January this year, those homes were music-free (at least played out-loud); the following week, the residents got their music back but had their activities and movement monitored with iBeacons and Nest Cam, while Apple Watch tracked their heart rate, exercise levels, calorific burn, and other metrics.

Participants also completed a video journal, describing how they were thinking and feeling.

Turns out, as you might expect, music does have an impact on your daily life. Average time spent together as a family increased by more than three hours across the week as a whole, while meals were communal 15-percent more of the time. The numbers were even higher for the US participants alone, where family meals increased by 24-percent.

That closeness expressed itself in other ways, too. In the US, people were 38-percent more likely to express love, and had 50-percent more sex in the week where music was played out loud.

"Couples who listen to music out loud the most have sex on average 2.5 times per week," Sonos says. "The couples who don't listen to music out loud have sex only 1.5 times per week."

While you'd be forgiven for thinking that the whole thing sounds a little self-serving – given it's Sonos and the Apple Music team behind it, and they've clearly got a vested interest in people playing more music – Sonos insists it's all above board. The company committed to the research without knowing what it would conclude, and the findings will be released as a full scientific paper (with, presumably, peer-validation in whatever journal it's published in).

NOW READ: Sonos PLAY:5 (2015) Review

What's also interesting is just how little research of this kind has been carried out before now, with Sonos claiming this particular study is the first of its kind. There are plenty of questions still lingering, too: the music itself was tracked, but there was no specific control for style, artist, or other factors.

There's a lot more data at Sonos' site, along with more details on how the participants were monitored and some of the individual feedback they gave on the experiment as a whole.

MORE Music Makes It Home