Metalheads Can Endure Pain Longer Thanks to the Festival Experience

True to the motto “Faster, harder, louder,” some 80,000 metal fans celebrate their music and bands at the Wacken Open Air every year. Lydia Schneider and Tom Fritz from the Max Planck Institute for Human Cognitive and Brain Sciences in Leipzig conducted a field study right on site to investigate whether and how the festival experience and listening to heavy metal live affect the audience’s pain tolerance, and they have now published their findings in the journal Scientific Reports. 

“Until now, we knew that suppressed anger has the greatest effect on the intensification of pain experiences in patients with chronic pain. That’s why we wanted to investigate whether the experience of pain changes—especially with a genre of music like heavy metal, which expresses quite a lot of unpleasant emotions, particularly anger,” says Lydia Schneider, the study’s first author, explaining her motivation for traveling to the Wacken Open Air in 2023 to study metal fans on-site. A total of 122 of them participated in the experiment conducted by the doctoral researcher from the Max Planck Institute for Human Cognitive and Brain Sciences, which involved measuring how long they could keep their hand and forearm in a device filled with ice-cold water after their heart rate and heart rate variability had been measured via ECG. “There was a huge rush to participate in the experiment, and we realized that science plays an important role in the scene,” says Lydia Schneider. The correlations are most clearly visible when only participants who drank no, little, or a moderate amount of alcohol throughout the test day are considered, since alcohol can unpredictably influence pain tolerance.

“First, we were able to measure the control group from the same cohort of metalheads, who are already on site before the live concerts begin and set up their tents with friends. 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. On the contrary—the festivalgoers were actually able to endure the cold-induced pain for longer than the control group,” says Lydia Schneider, describing the study’s surprising results. “The participants did not find the pain less unpleasant during the festival, nor were they less sensitive to it; rather, they were able to endure it for a longer period of time. 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—such as the time it took them to actually react to their unpleasant sensations by removing their hand and forearm from the ice-cold water.”

Tom Fritz, who conducted the study with her at the Wacken Open Air and heads the “Music-Evoked Brain Plasticity” group at the MPI CBS, explains: “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. Accepting unpleasant emotional states or difficult situations plays a central role in resilience and pain tolerance, and listening to angry music can therefore be beneficial rather than masking unpleasant emotions with positive ones. Metal music—or angry music in general—could thus likely play a preventive role in helping patients who experience a great deal of anger due to pain to avoid the development of chronic pain.”